Firms tied to West Bank settlements win £10.7m in UK deals after sanctions pledge

The £10.7 million that arrived after the promise

The United Kingdom has awarded £10.7 million ($14.4 million) in new public contracts to companies with links to illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, an Al Jazeera investigation published on Tuesday 10 November has found. The contracts were published after the government announced new powers on 8 September to sanction companies that profit from settlement activity, powers the foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, described in the House of Commons in uncompromising terms. “To those who finance or facilitate illegal settlements, let me say this: you will face the full force of UK sanctions,” Miliband told MPs that day. “Settlements are illegal.”

Since that announcement, British public bodies have published details of 18 further contracts with companies named by the United Nations over their involvement in settlements. The largest share, £10.4 million across 14 contracts, went to subsidiaries of Heidelberg Materials, the German building materials group, mostly for roadworks and resurfacing for National Highways and councils in Nottingham and Lincolnshire.

An earlier Al Jazeera investigation found 17 companies linked to settlements holding UK contracts worth more than £2.1 billion. The money, in other words, kept moving while the sanctions regime was still being built.

Eighteen contracts, four company groups, one UN list

The numbers come from published procurement records, company filings and contract data supplied by Tussell, a British public-sector market intelligence firm, checked against the United Nations Human Rights Office database of businesses involved in settlement-related activity, updated in September 2026. Heidelberg Materials, listed by the UN for the commercial use of natural resources in the occupied Palestinian territory, accounts for 14 of the 18 new contracts, worth £10.4 million ($14.5 million). The group has now been granted at least 35 UK contracts worth about £194.7 million ($261 million) across five subsidiaries.

Its Israeli subsidiary, Hanson Israel, owns the Nahal Raba quarry, south of Qalqilya in the West Bank, on land belonging to the Palestinian villages of az-Zawiya and Rafat, according to Who Profits. Heidelberg has previously said Hanson Israel ceased operations at the quarry and its associated plants in 2023, but Who Profits says approval to expand the site was granted on 28 May 2025, an assertion Heidelberg did not dispute when Al Jazeera put it to the company.

Motorola Solutions, listed by the UN for supplying security equipment and services, won two contracts worth about £87,900 ($118,000) for police communications. It remains by far the largest holder overall, with about £1.7 billion ($2.28 billion) in UK contracts, most of it through its subsidiary Airwave Solutions, including a £1.562 billion ($2.13 billion) Home Office extension for the secure network used by police, fire and ambulance services. The Chinese conglomerate Fosun saw its subsidiary Breas Medical win a £98,000 ($131,000) contract with Hull hospitals, taking the group’s UK total to at least £1.3 million ($1.74 million); and Egis, the French engineering group listed for transport services supporting settlements, saw its subsidiary Thomas & Adamson International win an £84,000 ($113,000) contract, taking its group total to at least £133.7 million ($179.3 million).

What the contracts do not show; and what London will not say

What the investigation cannot establish is intent. The records show that contracts were awarded and published; they do not show whether ministers knew of the awards when they were made, whether any official flagged the UN listings during the tender process, or whether any of the 18 contracts will now be reviewed, suspended or cancelled. Al Jazeera contacted the Cabinet Office for comment and received no response. The department had previously said exclusion decisions are made case by case.

That position is the hinge of the whole story, because the formal sanctions announced on 8 September are not yet in force. The import ban on settlement goods and the bans on construction, infrastructure, financing and real estate services for settlement expansion are expected to take effect within six to nine months, under legislation still to be passed. Until then, the government’s own guidance leaves the decision to each awarding body. Publication lags mean further awards may yet surface.

A sanctions regime tested by its own procurement

The story matters because it tests whether a government can use sanctions as a foreign-policy instrument while its own spending points the other way. The United Kingdom is not a bystander in the settlements question: it declared on 8 September that it considers Israel’s control over the entire West Bank an unlawful occupation, a position grounded in the International Court of Justice advisory opinion of 19 July 2024.

That legal framing is why the criticism has been so sharp. Neve Gordon, a professor at the school of law at Queen Mary University of London, told Al Jazeera the companies “appear to be in breach of their legal obligations under international humanitarian law”, adding that “any UK company that is involved in the occupation is likely to be in direct breach of the sanctions regime Ed Miliband is putting in place.” Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was blunter: “Britain cannot credibly claim that it is imposing sanctions on Israeli settlements while letting contracts continue through the back door.”

Why the gap between pledge and procurement keeps opening

The gap is structural, not accidental, and it has three moving parts. The first is timing. Miliband’s announcement was a promise of legislation, not legislation itself: the bans need six to nine months to take effect, and in the interval the old rules apply, under which a UN listing is not a disqualification and each public body decides for itself. The second is fragmentation. The contracts were awarded not by Whitehall but by National Highways, by councils, by hospitals and by the Home Office; a procurement system with thousands of buyers and no central screen for settlement links. The third is the definition of the target. The sanctions are aimed at companies that provide services for settlement expansion; the contracts in question are for British roads, British police radios and British hospital equipment, awarded to subsidiaries whose parent groups are listed for activities elsewhere.

The pattern is not new: the August investigation found the same, without a single prosecution. But the political arithmetic has changed since August. More than 140 Labour MPs were already calling for a ban on trade with settlements before the September announcement, and the prime minister, Andy Burnham, was said to be considering it. The new figures give that campaign fresh evidence at the moment when the legislation is being drafted; and when the government’s own backbenchers can ask, in the Commons, why the pledge of 8 September did not come with an instruction to stop signing.

The second-order effects: courts and the E1 clock

The ripples run in two directions. The first is legal. The UN database, the ICJ opinion and the government’s own declaration that the occupation is unlawful give campaigners and lawyers a framework for arguing that continued contracting breaches the UK’s international obligations; the argument Stephen Humphreys, professor of international law at the London School of Economics, made after the August investigation, when he said evidence was growing that the UK “may be in breach of its international obligations”.

The other direction is diplomatic, and it is governed by a deadline. On 19 October, Miliband warned companies bidding on tenders for the E1 settlement project, between Jerusalem and Ma’aleh Adumim, that they risked sanctions, and a Jerusalem court has allowed a tender for 1,234 homes in E1 to move forward. With Eisenkot chosen over Netanyahu to form Israel’s next government, the settlement question now sits before new leadership in Jerusalem as well as a new sanctions regime in London.

What to watch before the bans take effect

Two things will decide whether this story becomes a scandal or a footnote. The first is the legislation itself: the statutory bans on settlement goods and on services for settlement expansion are due within six to nine months of 8 September, and their drafting will show whether the government closes the procurement gap or leaves it to case-by-case decisions by thousands of public buyers. The second is the Cabinet Office. Its silence on the new findings cannot hold through a parliamentary session in which MPs, armed with the £10.7 million figure, will ask whether any of the 18 contracts has been reviewed.

Meanwhile the pressure from below continues. More than 100,000 people have signed a petition demanding an inquiry into Britain’s role in Gaza, and the street movements that filled European capitals; marches across Europe three years into the war; have made the settlements question a domestic political issue in Britain, not only a foreign-policy one. The contracts signed in the meantime will be the measure of whether it meant it.