How Israel’s energy diplomacy is fueling the Gaza genocide

Energy exports play a central role in Israel's campaign to normalize relations with its neighbors and avoid accountability for its ongoing genocide of Palestinians. An energy embargo on Israel should go hand-in-hand with calls for an arms embargo.

Published by Mondoweiss on 18 June 2025.

On March 17, 2025, Israel launched airstrikes across five municipalities across Gaza without warning. More than 400 Palestinians were murdered, including 100 children. The airstrikes violently ruptured the tentative ceasefire agreement brokered in January. Hours before the massacre, delegates from SOCAR, BP, and New Med arrived in Israel to officially announce a deal to explore the zone known as “Cluster I”; a 1700 sq km area near the Leviathan gas field operated by the U.S. global energy company, Chevron. Cluster I is one of several offshore exploration licenses tendered by Israel throughout the genocide, including licenses to extract gas from Palestinian waters annexed by Israel. 

With this new contract, energy corporations are deepening their complicity in Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine and genocide of Palestinians. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, in her From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide report, specifically highlights the role of energy companies, describing that:

“By supplying Israel with coal, gas, oil and fuel, companies are contributing to civilian infrastructures that Israel uses to entrench permanent annexation and weaponises in the destruction of Palestinian life. The same infrastructure services the Israeli military while it obliterates Gaza, including the network supplying the resources that these companies have provided. The ostensibly civilian nature of such infrastructure does not exonerate a company of responsibility.”

As oil, coal, and gas fuel the very infrastructure that reinforces the occupation and murders Palestinians, calls for an energy embargo on Israel go hand-in-hand with calls for an arms embargo. Colombia has imposed a coal embargo, and oil trade unions in Brazil are pressuring the government to end the export of oil to Israel, which consisted of 2.7m barrels of crude oil in 2024 alone. 

In the months since the short-lived January 19, 2025, ceasefire agreement, Israel has intensified its genocide in Gaza and formalized its plans for the forcible displacement of Palestinians from the strip. These escalations necessitate a stronger international strategy for confronting Zionist supply chains and holding Israel to account. 

Simultaneously, Israel’s energy sector, in particular its gas industry, has received investment from Western multinational energy companies, such as BP, Chevron, and ENI. This development of gas production sites in Israel’s alleged maritime zones forms a core part of the infrastructure relied on to uphold its occupation and, ultimately, less dependent on externally-sourced energy imports. 

Israel’s capacity to produce large-scale volumes of gas also puts energy at the forefront of the settler colonial state’s path to normalization in the region. In recent years, Israel has sought to counter its geopolitical isolation through deals with neighboring states, such as Jordan and Egypt, as well as the EU. From the secretive $10 billion deal with Jordan over natural gas to the recent Memorandum of Understanding with the EU and Egypt, the settler colonial state normalizes its presence by entwining its gas market with the energy security of its neighbors.  

Our strategies to confront the genocide must intentionally integrate a confrontation of state and private energy companies, who are both providing this infrastructure and facilitating energy-based normalization deals.