This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on March 14, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
A report published Thursday shows that major fossil fuel companies such as Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP are playing a key role in propelling Israel’s devastating military assault on Gaza, facilitating the country’s supply of energy that powers Israeli jets and tanks as they bomb and shell civilians.
The new research, conducted by Data Desk and commissioned by the advocacy group Oil Change International, examines the sources of Israeli jet fuel and crude imports in an effort to shine light on the web of countries and corporations implicated in the war on the Gaza Strip.
Israel, which relies heavily on oil imports, has received at least three tankers of jet fuel from the United States since the start of the war, the research shows. A number of countries—including nations whose leaders have criticized the assault on Gaza—have continued supplying Israel with crude oil during its military campaign, which has killed more than 31,000 people in less than six months and sparked a horrific humanitarian crisis.
Israel gets “relatively small but regular shipments of crude oil via the SUMED pipeline,” which “receives crude oil from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Iraq, and from Egypt through which the pipeline travels,” the report notes.
“Countries and major oil companies fueling Israel’s war machine are complicit in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.”
Data Desk’s analysis confirms that the diesel and gasoline Israel uses to fuel its tanks and other military vehicles are generated by the country’s own refineries, but those facilities rely on imports from Russia, Brazil, Azerbaijan, and elsewhere.
“Major international oil and gas companies complicit in facilitating these supplies of crude oil include: BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, Eni, and TotalEnergies,” the report says.
The research points to several specific pipelines that deliver crude to Israel, including Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) and the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC).
BP operates the BTC pipeline and Exxon, TotalEnergies, and other prominent oil companies are shareholders. Chevron owns the largest stake in the CPC pipeline.
Allie Rosenbluth, U.S. program manager at Oil Change International, urged countries to “leverage their oil supply as a means to demand an immediate cease-fire and an end to the occupation.”
“Countries and major oil companies fueling Israel’s war machine are complicit in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people,” said Rosenbluth. “By directly fueling Israel’s military, on top of over a hundred other weapons sales, the U.S. in particular must be held accountable for potential violations of international law.”
Human rights organizations have been calling for an arms embargo on Israel for months, but less attention has been paid to the country’s energy supply.
In late February, a coalition of Palestinian advocacy organizations stressed that “energy supplies are instrumental to Israel’s war machine: to operate its army tanks, armored personnel carriers, ships, and military bulldozers, including specialist jet fuel that allows Israeli jets to rain death and destruction down on Gaza.”
The groups called on governments around the world to immediately halt all energy exports to Israel and implored workers and activists to do everything in their power to “disrupt the flow of energy making Israel’s genocide possible.”
Mahmoud Nawajaa, general coordinator of the Palestinian BDS National Committee, said in response to the new report Thursday that “states and companies that continue to provide Israel with fuel for its military forces are directly complicit in supporting its ongoing genocide.”
“The BDS movement, which is already targeting Chevron with a growing global boycott and divestment campaign, will expose and target the complicit states and corporations mentioned in this valuable report,” Nawajaa added.
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