UN list targets firms linked to Israeli settlements

JERUSALEM (AP) — The U.N. human rights office on Wednesday released a list of more than 100 companies it said are complicit in violating Palestinian human rights by operating in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank — a first-ever international attempt to name and shame businesses that has drawn fierce Israeli condemnation.The list’s publication after repeated delays escalated a looming showdown between Israel and the international community over its more than half-century policy of building settlements in the West Bank. After some Israeli-American homeowners sued, the company reversed course and said it would donate all profits from the listings to humanitarian aid organizations.Israel and the U.S. regularly accuse the Human Rights Council of anti-Israel bias, and the Trump administration withdrew the United States in 2018 — faulting the U.N. for accepting autocratic governments that the administration said have repeatedly violated human rights. “The U.N. Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights has officially decided to endorse anti-Semitic BDS by issuing a defamatory list of companies it claims are supposedly involved in ‘settlement activity,’” said Anne Herzberg, legal adviser for NGO Monitor, an Israeli advocacy group that is highly critical of the U.N. But in a statement, the BDS movement called for action against the companies.