GENEVA: The United Nations on Friday released a long-awaited update of its database of companies with activities in Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories, listing 158 firms from 11 countries.

UN rights chief Volker Turk has condemned as a war crime Israel’s policy of settlements on Palestinian territory in the occupied West Bank.

Big firms such as Airbnb, Booking.com, Motorola Solutions and Trip Advisor remained on the list, while several others were removed, the non-exhaustive database showed.

Most of the companies were based in Israel, while others were based in the United States, Britain, France, Canada, Germany, China, Luxe­mbourg, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal.

Sixty-eight new companies added to the 2023 list

The UN rights office report called on companies to “take appropriate action to address the adverse human rights impacts” of their activities. “Where business enterprises identify that they have caused or contributed to adverse human rights impacts, they should provide for or cooperate in remediation through appropriate processes,” it stressed.

Turk said in a statement: “This report underscores the due diligence responsibility of businesses working in contexts of conflict to ensure their activities do not contribute to human rights abuses.”

The list was first produced by the UN human rights office in 2020 amid harsh Israeli criticism. It came in response to a UN Human Rights Council resolution four years earlier demanding a database of firms that profited from business in illegally occupied Palestinian territory.

The UN rights office was asked to list firms found to be taking part in any of 10 specific activities, including construction, surveillance, demolitions and destruction of agricultural land in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

It has stressed that listing companies in the database was “not, and does not purport to be, a judicial or quasi-judicial process”.

“A total of 68 new companies were added to the list published in 2023, while seven of those... were removed as they were no longer involved in any of the activities concerned,” the rights office said. The list is not exhaustive, the rights office said, acknowledging that it had only had time to review 215 of the 596 companies about which it received submissions.

Published in Dawn, September 27th, 2025