UBS is heavily investing in Elbit System’s femicide

Palestinian women at the heart of the resistance

Whether displaced within the country or living in exile, Palestinian women have always been at the heart of the Resistance. They are at the center of the struggle in all areas of political and social life¹. From the logistical and economic management of the first Intifada in 1987 to advocating for Palestinian rights in the US Congress, women are the cornerstone of Palestine’s very existence. Whether in refugee camps in neighboring countries, in the West Bank, or in the Gaza Strip, they have been the guardians of Palestinian social reproduction and culture, and they have taken the lead in most organizations, such as prisoner committees and community support groups. Abroad, in major Western cities, they have ensured the (re)construction of Diaspora communities. As researcher and professor Nada Elia demonstrates, women “mobilized hundreds of thousands of civilians, ran mobile health clinics, created clandestine schools when Israel brutally closed Palestinian schools, and launched indigenous self-sufficiency initiatives to enable Palestinians to boycott Israeli products.”² The BDS movement, for example, would not exist without them.

Israel targets and attacks Palestinian women

Israel has long understood the vital role of women’s leadership in organizing Palestinian civil society, and has embarked on a campaign of mass femicide, which has intensified since October 7^th, 2023.

Palestinian women are not collateral victims. For years, they have been specifically targeted in the apartheid system established by Israel. As Nada Elia pointed out: “Racist control of the population is based specifically on violence against women. (…) Mordechai Kedar, a former Israeli military intelligence officer turned academic, pragmatically suggests that ‘raping the wives and mothers of Palestinian fighters would deter militants’ from attacking. Similarly, Israeli MP Ayelet Shaked has openly called for the killing of Palestinian children, saying that Palestinian women should also be killed since they give birth to ‘little snakes’.”³

The gendered aspect of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people is often overlooked. Yet women suffer triple dehumanization. By Israel, which reduces them to mere breeders and therefore targets them as a demographic threat; by Western media, which reduces them to veiled and silent creatures, subjugated to terrorists; and by the vast majority of feminist movements, which completely obscure their agency and do not consider them worthy of their solidarity. This mixture of Zionist propaganda, Islamophobia, and pure anti-Arab racism effectively mitigates all warnings from major international organizations and the highest legal authorities.

The health and lives of Palestinian women in danger

The Commission for Palestinian Prisoners and Former Prisoners, together with the Palestinian Prisoners Society, has published a report on the conditions of detention of Palestinian women in Israeli prisons⁴. These women face torture, starvation, sexual assault, medical neglect, and psychological abuse, among other things.

During World Health Week, World Health Organization spokesperson Margaret Harris stated that 90% of pregnant and breastfeeding women in the Gaza Strip were suffering from severe malnutrition and that a lack of medical supplies was preventing them from receiving the care they needed.

According to the October 10^th, 2024 report by the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, an extremely worrying number of women are contracting diseases every day due to a lack of medical care, as Israel has deliberately destroyed the healthcare system in the Gaza Strip. According to the UN, Gaza now has the highest number of amputee children per capita in the world. These children, disabled for life, are left in the care of the surviving women.

Israel attacks and targets Palestinian women

According to the UN, between March 18^th and April 9^th, 2025, 224 Israeli strikes targeted homes (including tents belonging to displaced people). During the same period, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that 36 Israeli strikes listed by the UN killed only women and children⁵. Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, Yoav Gallant, and other members of the Israeli government have repeatedly stated publicly their desire to eradicate the Palestinian people. By attacking women, Israel is attacking the heart and the future of society, but it is also waging psychological warfare, where the social fabric is so deeply destroyed that there are fears of total eradication, which is why all observers and international organizations are talking about genocide. Oxfam International states that the annual death toll of women and children killed by Israel in Gaza exceeds that of all other recent conflicts around the world.

The UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences, Reem Alsalem, described what was unfolding in Gaza as a “femi-genocide”, saying « the scale and nature of the crimes inflicted on Palestinian women and girls by Israeli forces are so extreme that existing concepts in legal and criminal frameworks can no longer adequately describe or capture them »⁶.

Elbit Systems’ responsibility in the femicide

The arms giant and leading supplier to the Israeli army — which prides itself on its low environmental impact! — offers, among other things, drones, missiles, and bombs that have been «combat-proven»⁷. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip have been used for years by various Israeli developers as a showcase, a unique and privileged laboratory for testing their weapons and demonstrating their «proper functioning» in «densely populated areas»⁸. The Israeli army has always used Elbit’s innovations on the Palestinian population, and this market has unsurprisingly boomed since October 2023. However, women and children are not the targets one imagines when thinking of “combat testing.” According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 70% of those killed in Gaza or the West Bank are women and children.

While Elbit designs and supplies advanced weaponry to the Israeli army, it also develops equipment for surveillance and intelligence. Between the blockade imposed by Israel on the Gaza Strip since 2007, surveillance, imprisonment and/or administrative detention, and population displacement, Palestinian society is literally suffocating. And this suffocation has a particular impact on women. During her hearing before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the French National Assembly, Ms. Hala Abou-Hassira, representative of the Palestinian Authority in France, reported that beyond the human losses, the destruction of infrastructure and social life has now resulted in a 69-year setback in economic development. This setback and the damage done to the region’s infrastructure have a particular impact on women, as shown in the Human Rights Watch report entitled “Five Babies in an Incubator: Violations of the Rights of Pregnant Women During Israeli Attacks on Gaza” dated January 29, 2025, which denounces the intolerable living conditions of young girls, women, and women who are pregnant or have just given birth.

The Ministry of Health in Gaza reported on March 8, 2025, marking International Women’s Day, that 12,316 women were killed, 490 women imprisoned, more than 2,000 women had one or more limbs amputated, 14,000 were widowed, 1,700 had lost one or more children, and 50,000 had lost their babies throughout the war.

Divestment. Now.

At the end of 2023, the whole world shuddered at the explosion of weapons, civilian casualties, and the scale of destruction. In the first quarter of 2024, UBS increased its investment in Elbit by 875%, becoming one of the largest institutional investors in the arms manufacturer. Fifteen months later, the bank had further increased its shareholding tenfold..

It is unacceptable that our money continue to be used to develop an industry dedicated to ethnic cleansing. Let’s close our UBS bank accounts. Let’s move our funds to other banks. Let’s send a clear signal to UBS and the business community: No, the public does not accept that its income should be used for criminal purposes by bankers with no moral limits.

Let’s stop ignoring the fact that the occupation and militarism in which our government and large corporations such as UBS are complicit have gender dimensions. Let’s realize that the dichotomy that considers Israel to be “Western,” “modern,” and “civilized,” and Palestine to be “backward” ⁹and deserving of the punishment it is currently receiving, is responsible for the situation of women in Palestine.

Beyond symbols, let us take responsibility for Palestinian women and take economic action! Out of sisterhood, solidarity, and humanity, let us boycott Israel’s trading partners, such as Elbit and its investors, following the example of UBS! Feminist strike flags on balconies, purple pins, and slogans don’t stop bullets… Economic boycotts, on the other hand, prevent them from being fired! All these closed bank accounts will no longer feed Elbit System’s destructive machine!

UBS divest from war profiteers. Now.

1 Women at the Heart of Gaza’s Rebirth, Walaa Abu Zaiter, August 2024

2 Palestine , N. Elia, Remu-menage, 2024, Textes traduits de l’anglais (États-Unis) par Liza Hammar et Francis Dupuis-Déri.

3 Ibid.

5 https://www.ohchr.org/fr/press-briefing-notes/2025/04/gaza-increasing-israeli-evacuation-orders-lead-forcible-transfer

6 https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/07/gaza-un-expert-denounces-genocidal-violence-against-women-and-girls

7 https://www.elbitsystems.com/air-space/air-surface-munitions/bombs/mpr

8 https://www.elbitsystems.com/air-space/air-surface-munitions/bombs/mpr-500#page=2

9 Dichotomy put forward by Nada Elia