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.
BP’s gas exploration licenses The March 2025 agreement marks the revival of a delayed gas exploration project that Israel’s then Energy Minister, Israel Katz, initially declared in late October 2023 . Though the original announcement was timed as a “show of confidence” to the global energy sector, the project was frozen due to Israel’s escalation of its genocide in Gaza, and no further progress was made until earlier this year
Crucially, this deal marks BP’s first direct involvement in Israel’s natural gas sector, and its timing is noteworthy. As Albanese’s recent investigation details, “At a time of increasing brutality, British BP p.l.c. is expanding involvement in the Israeli economy, with exploration licenses confirmed in March 2025, which allow BP to explore Palestinian maritime expanses illegally exploited by Israel”.
Although exploration may still be in the early phases, the agreement signals the possibility of increased Israeli gas reserves in the future that could reinforce the domestic market and, significantly, be exported to other countries. What is certain is that any gas extracted as a result of this project will be used to fuel Israeli military forces, carceral structures, and illegal settlements.
Israel currently owns two major gas reserves, the Tamar and Leviathan gas fields, both operated by Chevron . The Tamar gas field is the main supplier for the state-owned Israel Electric Corporation (IEC), which provides energy to Israeli government institutions, including military bases, prisons, and illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. The IEC also controls the Palestinian power grid, part of which should deliver electricity to Gaza. As supported now by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, one of Israel’s initial acts of collective punishment against Palestinians in Gaza was to cut off electricity; it is well documented that Israel’s restriction of fuel and energy supplies required to sustain most functions of life, has formed part of the Zionist state’s broader strategy to occupy Gaza and engineer a genocide.
While Israel’s gas reserves undoubtedly power the carceral infrastructure needed to maintain its occupation, exports play an equally important role in reinforcing the stability of the Israeli state. Israel’s gas production enables the negotiation of energy-centric normalization deals with neighbors such as Egypt and Jordan, integrating Israel into the regional economy and legitimizing its occupation of Palestinian territory. The recent exploration licenses must be seen as a continuation of this strategy, intended in the long term to enhance Israel’s export capacity and deepen ties with the Azeri and British players.
These new licences mark BP and SOCAR’s most direct involvement in Israel’s energy sector. However, both companies have long played a role in supplying energy to the Zionist entity. Amid the ongoing genocide, 28% of Israel’s oil comes from Azerbaijan through the BP-operated Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline as of late 2024. The pipeline was created following a $7.4 billion agreement in 1994 stipulating that SOCAR would develop Azerbaijan’s oil fields in collaboration with Western oil companies, including BP. Although Azerbaijani customs records claim exports to Israel stopped in October, Israeli sources report that Azerbaijan continues to deliver oil through international traders. SOCAR – the state oil company of Azerbaijan – also bought a 10% stake in the Tamar gas field.
The third partner company is NewMed – an Israeli company that currently holds the largest share of the Leviathan gas field. Previously known as Delek Drilling, it’s a subsidiary of Delek Group, an Israeli company owned by billionaire Yitzhak Tshuva. Delek Group was flagged on a 2020 UN blacklist for being engaged in “activities that raised particular human rights concerns” in Israeli settlements illegal under international law. NewMed additionally has gas exploration contracts with the governments of Cyprus , Bulgaria, and Morocco, the latter of which are located in occupied Western Sahara’s waters.
On the surface, this joint corporate venture appears to be yet another collaboration of energy companies willing to ignore genocide in pursuit of profit. However, the makeup of this consortium mirrors deepening state-to-state relationships. These geopolitical connections forged out of mutual interest form the basis of private energy development projects.
Azerbaijan and Israel Grow Closer Azerbaijan and Israel’s partnership is summarized by the flow of oil and weapons ; Azerbaijan is Israel’s largest oil supplier, and in return, Israel is one of Azerbaijan’s largest weapons suppliers – estimated to have supplied 70% weapons between 2016 and 2020.
For this reason, Azerbaijan is a key strategic ally for Israel and Western imperialist states. After independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Western governments were quick to exploit oil and strategic geography of Azerbaijan, and BP was an early presence in post-Soviet Baku. In 1992, a year after Azerbaijan declared independence from the Soviet Union, Israel armed Azerbaijan’s forces with US made weapons against Armenians in the first Nagorno-Karabakh War.
Currently, the US is prevented from supplying aid and arms to Azerbaijan due to Section 907 (the ‘Freedom Support Act’) which, by extension, prevents the US from exerting pressure along the 765 km border it shares with Iran. Baku has been seeking a repeal of 907 to benefit from a US alliance, and Donald Trump has expressed his desire to include Azerbaijan in the Abraham Accords – the agreement to normalize relations between Israel and Arab nations.
Significantly, diplomatic ties have become more open since Israel, along with Turkey , heavily supported Azerbaijan to recapture Nagorno-Karabakh between 2020 and 2023, and the Zionist state continues to invest in its military hardware. Azerbaijan reciprocated by announcing in 2022 that the country will open an embassy in Tel Aviv. It was also recently published that Azerbaijan has hosted a number of mediation talks between Israel and Turkey this year “to defuse Syria tensions.” Turkey is reportedly a prospective buyer of new Israeli gas exports. After October 7th 2023, flights also continued uninterrupted, and tourism from Israel to Azerbaijan has increased.
Culminating in SOCAR’s stake in the gas licenses, Israel’s relationship with Azerbaijan shows how Israeli ‘energy diplomacy’ is used to create co-dependencies and exert influence over strategically important Muslim-majority countries; a dynamic which Israel also seeks to exploit with the fossil fuel wealth looted from occupied Palestine.
Energy as a Vehicle for Normalization Since the Leviathan gas fields were discovered by Israel off the coast of the city of Haifa in 2010, Israel has sought to re-position itself as a gas superpower in the Middle East. Offshore gas exploited by Israel far exceeds its domestic market size. Per capita , gas reserves claimed by Israel are twice as much as Canada and nearly three times as much as the United States. Natural gas exports have helped fund the Israeli war machine; since the start of natural gas production in Israel, the state has collected NIS 30 billion in state revenues from fees, profit levies, and corporation tax. However, even more valuable than economic returns are the Arab consumers of Israeli gas, with natural gas exports to Egypt and Jordan increasing by 13.4% in 2024.
Israel is transparent about its political aspirations to exploit fossil fuel resources. Earlier this year, Israel’s minister of Energy and Infrastructure, Eli Cohen , said the growth of gas production was significant not only for Israel’s economy, but also its regional power – praising the success of exports to Arab neighbors, as an asset for “strengthening regional stability and security and strengthening our international standing”, and hoping to see “more companies” and “more competition” in the gas market.
Israel’s looting of gas reserves has faced little disruption since it launched its latest assault on Gaza. A US-brokered maritime agreement between Israel and Lebanon in 2022 means gas production has faced less disruption than oil imports which were targeted by Yemen’s Ansarullah forces. Therefore, while systematically murdering and starving Palestinians, Israel is securitizing its own energy market, taking advantage of shifting geopolitics and normalizing diplomatic relations.
Israel hopes to export gas to Europe, offering a more ‘reliable’ supply than Russia. Russia’s gas supply to Europe fell dramatically following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, from 45% of 19% of imports between 2022 and 2024, which has been replaced by piped gas from Norway and Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) from Qatar and the United States. Globally, a major shift from pipeline to LNG has taken place since 2022 as a more flexible method of import than pipelined gas. However, pipelined supply can be advantageous for creating co-dependency between connected countries – for example, the connection of physical gas infrastructure between Russia and Europe has frustrated EU plans to shut off its supply , and Russian gas continued flowing through Ukraine until a deal expired in 2025. Israel could ‘learn lessons’ from Russian gas to become an ‘all seasons’ exporter, while fusing infrastructure with piped supply to its neighbors.
Egypt is the largest gas producer and consumer in the Eastern Mediterranean, and in 2018, signed its first major gas deal with Israel . The government justified these controversial gas imports by re-exporting them to the international market. However, a continued energy deficit has made Egypt increasingly reliant on gas imports from Israel for industrial and domestic consumption.
Egypt’s discovery of the vast Zohr gas field in 2015 sparked a ‘bonanza’ of foreign investment by foreign fossil fuel companies seeking to exploit vast gas reserves. Egypt’s hopes to become self-sufficient were thwarted in 2022 when investors began pulling dollars out of the country after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February in a rush for safe havens – $20bn in the first three weeks. Amid the foreign currency crunch, Egypt could not pay foreign oil and gas companies , which caused a decline in exploration and production and made pre-existing gas shortages worse.
In June 2022, the EU, Egypt, and Israel signed a gas deal involving the shipment of Israeli gas to be liquified in Egyptian processing plants and then shipped to Europe. EU President Ursula von der Leyen praised the deal for bringing the EU closer to Israel and ending the dependency on Russian energy used for ‘blackmail’. Crucially, the gas deal followed an agreement finalized earlier that year involving the EU committing €6.6 million to the EuroAsia interconnector ; a network linking power grids of Israel, Cyprus, Greece and Europe.
Despite EU and Israeli investments, Egypt’s large supply and demand deficit continued, which halted LNG exports and caused a loss of valuable foreign exchange. Egypt responded in 2023 with planned power outages to cope with growing demand for domestic and industrial use, and surging demand for cooling following extreme heat . Regular blackouts, particularly in rural regions, were a significant source of frustration, leading to uprisings against excessive energy use among elites and continued plans to export Egyptian fuel to Europe.
In March 2024, EU leaders signed a €7.4bn (£6.3bn) three-year strategic partnership deal with Egypt on key areas of cooperation, including economic stability, investment, energy, food security, and migration. The strategic partnership includes promises to strengthen the East Mediterranean Gas Forum ; a platform for securing cooperation to develop a regional natural gas market, with members including Jordan, Israel, Cyprus, Greece, Egypt, Palestine, France and Italy – and the World Bank Group, EU and the US as observers. Von der Leyen said the deal with Egypt underlined the “strategic location” in ‘a ‘very troubled neighbourhood’ , shedding light on the EU’s concerns about the 9 million displaced people settled in Egypt, who could cross the Mediterranean to Europe if they face continued hardship. Nonetheless, the emphasis on diplomatic relationships along with plans for the EuroAsia interconnector indicates how gas and energy deals will continue to feature as a core component of Israel’s normalization with neighboring states.
In May 2025, the EU published a roadmap to end dependency on Russian fuel in full. To secure EU energy, the roadmap sets out a plan to diversify sources – including through ‘enhancing energy diplomacy’ to cooperate with partner countries in the Middle East, Northern Africa, around the Black Sea. However, demand for gas in Europe is declining , and domestic infrastructure could meet its gas needs in the future. In April 2025, Trump said the EU must buy at least $3.5 bn of US energy for tariff relief, and the EU have signaled they will agree to swap Russian for US gas to avoid tariffs. A bilateral US-EU deal could therefore squeeze Egypt out of the LNG export to the EU in the future and minimize their ability to profit from gas exports. Even if such a transatlantic gas deal comes into fruition, Egypt would remain reliant on Israeli gas as it shifts to becoming a net gas importer.
To this point, future deals with Israel point to Egypt becoming increasingly dependent on Israeli gas extracted and transported through territories in Lebanon, Gaza, and Egypt seized by Israel. In September 2024, Egypt signed a new deal to increase gas imports from Israel to end planned blackouts – agreeing to increase Israeli gas imports by 20% in October 2024, and planned to increase by 50% by the end of 2025, following the completion of a Ashdod-Ashkelon pipeline expansion. Existing pipelines in the Sinai have been met with resistance, with a surge of pipelines attacked after the fall of Mubarak in 2011.
Towards an energy embargo This recent history exemplifies how energy exports play a central role in allowing Israel to normalize relationships with its neighbors and avoid accountability for its ongoing genocide of Palestinians. When international companies, or states themselves in SOCAR’s case, are willing to further integrate themselves into the Israeli economy during an ongoing genocide, they enable Israel’s violence and must in turn be held accountable.
The officiated exploration licenses for the BP, SOCAR, and NewMed consortium are a troubling development. Israel intends to also press forward with plans to host a fifth bidding round for exploration licenses of its offshore gas fields
Since January 2024, we have mobilized locally in Britain around calls for an energy embargo from below by targeting the operations of corporations embedded in Israel’s energy market, particularly BP. This includes exposing the ways energy companies seek to manufacture consent for their activities by investing, and therefore associating themselves with, in socially accepted institutions such as universities and museums .
We call on people across the world to join us in challenging the role of energy-focused investment deals alongside the military and diplomatic support Israel continues to receive from Western states and companies.
https://mondoweiss.net/2025/07/how-israels-energy-diplomacy-is-fueling-the-gaza-genocide/
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