Arab Organisation for Human Rights in the UK (AOHR UK) submitted a request to the British Foreign Office to impose sanctions on the World Zionist Organization (WZO) and the Amana organisation -an Israeli settlement movement – for their active role in supporting settlers who practice terrorism against Palestinians.
AOHR UK submitted a detailed report with evidence on the two organisations’ role in signing contracts with settlers who were sanctioned by the Foreign Office. The contracts include lands allocated for building settlement outposts for the settlers to expand, steal more land, and attack Palestinians in the neighbourhood.
The occupation government uses the WZO’s Settlement Department to transfer funds to settlers to build settlement outposts. The occupation government transferred more than 5.6 million pounds to the settlement department in 2023 to build 101 settlement outposts, through which the department transferred the funds to local councils that finance individuals and organisations to establish settlement outposts.
Moreover, WZO has directly signed contracts with settlers on the sanctions list in Britain, Canada and the United States, including the settler Zvi Bar Yosef, who signed a contract with the Settlement Division to establish a farm, and the extremist settler Moshe Sharvit, who seized land and established settlement outposts on it.
Amana organization was included in Canada’s sanctions list as one of the most active settlement organisations, so it is described as the “mother and father” of the illegal settlement outposts. Its assets are worth more than 120 million pounds sterling, and it has an open annual budget estimated at tens of millions of pounds sterling.
Amana also signed a contract with settler Yinon Levy, who is on the British sanctions list due to his role in managing the Mitarim farm, established in 2021, and whose settlers used physical violence and destruction of property to displace Palestinian communities in October 2023.
AOHR UK expressed its surprise that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would impose sanctions on individuals while leaving the organisations that provide them with material and moral support free of sanctions, especially since these people would not have been able to carry out the brutal attacks against the Palestinians without the support of these organisations. In addition to this, these two organisations are known to be active in the field of settlement in general.
In its request, AOHR UK stressed that Israel’s allies, including the United Kingdom, have turned a blind eye to the crimes of the occupation government in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and continued providing it with all kinds of support, and did not dare impose sanctions on government officials, most notably Benjamin Netanyahu, for being responsible for all the crimes committed in the occupied territories.
The sanctions list issued by the United Kingdom against individual settlers does not absolve the British government of its responsibilities and is seen as a deceiving act to maintain its image while giving unlimited support to the occupation government, which makes the government involved in the crimes committed by the occupation government.
After a whole year of genocide in the Gaza Strip and decades of settlement in the occupied territories, the British government is supposed to at least impose comprehensive sanctions on the occupation government and stop the export of all weapons used to kill Palestinians.
The British government sanctions list is meaningless if it does not include the main players in the crime of settlement. It is worth noting that there are dozens of settlement organisations operating in the occupied Palestinian territories with branches in various countries of the world and collect donations to support the criminal activities of the settlers.
AOHR UK called on all countries in which these organisations have branches, collect donations, and benefit from tax exemptions to close their offices and prosecute their officials for their involvement in crimes described in international humanitarian law as war crimes.
