World’s largest shipping firm facilitates US trade with illegal Israeli settlements
The Cradle | February 9, 2026
The world’s largest shipping firm, Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), has been transporting goods from the illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank to the US, including via European ports.
According to a joint investigation by Al-Jazeera and the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) published on 9 February, commercial documents obtained through US import databases show that between 1 January and 22 November 2025, MSC facilitated at least 957 shipments of goods from Israeli settlements to the US.
Of these shipments, more than half transited through European ports, including 390 in Spain, 115 in Portugal, 22 in the Netherlands, and two in Belgium.
MSC is privately owned by Italian billionaire Gianluigi Aponte and his Italian-Israeli wife, Rafaela Aponte-Diamant.
“Israeli settlements are widely considered illegal under international law, because they are built on occupied territory, in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention,” noted Nicola Perugini, senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Edinburgh.
“Commercialising products from these settlements effectively supports the illegal settlements,” she affirmed.
A wide range of products are produced in the settlements, from food items and textiles to skin care and natural stones, Al-Jazeera noted.
Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza during the Six-Day War in 1967 and has sought to oust the native Palestinian Muslims and Christians and replace them with Jewish Israelis in an effort to create “Greater Israel.”
Professor Perugini called on states to ban trade with illegal settlements entirely. “You cannot normalize the profits of an illegal occupation,” he said.
The US and EU allow imports of products from Israeli settlements, despite policies formally acknowledging the settlements are illegal.
MSC also facilitates shipments from the US and Europe to the Israeli settlements.
In 2025, MSC facilitated at least 14 shipments from the Italian port of Ravenna, listing the names and zip codes of Israeli settlements as recipients.
MSC also holds cooperation and vessel-sharing agreements with Israel’s publicly held cargo shipping company, ZIM.
Such shipments may be illegal under international law following a 2024 opinion by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) advising that third states are obliged to “prevent trade or investment relations that assist in the maintenance of the illegal situation created by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
The ICJ opinion does not directly address the responsibility of private corporations like MSC.
PYM, a grassroots, international pro-Palestinian movement, found last year that Danish shipping firm Maersk, the world’s second largest, also ships products to and from Israeli settlements.
According to UN estimates, businesses located in illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem contribute about $30 billion to the Israeli economy each year.
Settlement businesses are often unusually profitable as they are established on stolen Palestinian land that the company has not paid for.
Israel has recently accelerated efforts to expand the E1 settlement project, designed sever the West Bank into two parts, isolate it from East Jerusalem, and ensure a two-state solution becomes impossible.
The plan calls for constructing 3,500 apartments next to the existing settlement of Maale Adumim.
On Sunday, the Israeli government approved sweeping changes to land registration and civil control in the occupied West Bank, which will dramatically expand settlement construction, Middle East Eye (MEE) reported on Monday.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Defense Minister Israel Katz said the policy changes are intended to pave the way for expanded settlements and land seizures.
Under the new measures, the military will be allowed to demolish Palestinian buildings and homes for which Israel refused to issue a building permit in areas A and B of the West Bank
The changes would also open West Bank land registries to the Israeli public, enabling settlers to identify Palestinian landowners and pressure them to sell their land.
Making ownership records public could also make it easier for settlers to forge claims over Palestinian land, and thereby seize Palestinian land through Israeli courts, MEE added.
The measures also loosen restrictions on the sale of Palestinian land to Israelis, overturning a Jordanian-era law prohibiting transfers to non-Palestinians.
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Book Review
Kincora: British intelligence-run sex abuse brothel?
By Kit Klarenberg · The Grayzone · February 6, 2026
Half a century after the public learned that boys at a Belfast group home were sexually assaulted by senior staff, a key question remains unanswered: was British intelligence implicated in the abuse conspiracy, and did Kincora serve as a ‘honeypot’ to entrap and blackmail powerful figures?
A vast trove of declassified files on Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual, political, and intelligence escapades released by the US Department of Justice has once again thrust disgraced former Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor into the spotlight. With British police reportedly reviewing Andrew’s past sexual activities and links to Epstein, questions are growing about whether Britain’s spy agencies were aware of Andrew’s alleged escapades with minors.
If the darkest rumors turn out to be true, it will not be the first time a British royal had been embroiled in a child rape conspiracy with spy agency involvement. Back in 1980, a scandal erupted when the Kincora Boys’ Home in occupied Ireland was exposed as a secret brothel run by powerful pedophiles. Chief among the alleged perpetrators was Lord Mountbatten — Andrew’s great-uncle.
From the very beginning, hints began to appear that MI5/MI6 knew of the child abuse taking place Kincora, and could have even been running the group home as part of a dastardly intelligence plot. With Britain’s domestic and foreign spies engaged in a savage dirty war in Ireland, and both services running operatives in Republican and Unionist paramilitaries, Kincora would have provided an ideal means of recruiting and compromising potential assets. Official investigations have strongly insinuated British intelligence chiefs had a close bond with many individuals who ran the Boys’ Home.
In May 2025, veteran BBC journalist Chris Moore published a forensic account of the case titled Kincora: Britain’s Shame. Featuring four and a half decades of firsthand research by the author, its groundbreaking contents have been met with general silence by British mainstream media.
In the book, Moore argues persuasively that the Boys’ Home was just one component of a more extensive child abuse network extending across British-occupied Ireland and beyond — in which London’s spying apparatus was not only aware, but likely complicit. … continue
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