Israel’s War Just Entered Unaffordable Territory

Right, so they tell you genocide is complicated. They tell you it’s tragic, regrettable, unresolvable, a matter of perspectives, a conflict older than memory. They say this while the paperwork sits in plain sight evidencing all the whys and wherefores though. On 26 January 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled that genocide in Gaza was plausible. Not debated. Not speculated. Plausible. And when that ruling landed, the law changed. A duty switched on. Every state, every public institution, every bank tied into the European system became responsible for what it funded next. The European Investment Bank kept its project pipeline open though. The listings are public. The dates are visible. Nobody hid anything. They didn’t need to. They assumed you would be too overwhelmed to read a database. They assumed you would look away. They always do. The problem this time is: someone didn’t. The Hind Rajab Foundation read the documents. And now the bank is on the record and they are getting dragged to court it seems. And this carries major consequences for Israel and those facilitating their funding.
Right, so the ICJ ruled that the charge of genocide in Gaza was plausible, we all know this by now don’t we? The ruling did not conclude the case, that is very much ongoing. But it do something of at least equal weight to my mind. It imposed a legal duty on states to prevent assistance to the acts under investigation. That duty applied immediately. It did not wait for appeals. It did not wait for a final verdict. It didn’t need to. It landed the moment the order was issued. The court’s language was explicit. States must ensure they do not aid or assist a genocide while it is being examined. That duty is not complicated. It is binding, under treaty law that every European state has ratified.
The European Investment Bank is the public development bank of the European Union. It is not an ordinary lender. It does not operate on commercial discretion. Its financing decisions are part of the legal fabric of the European bloc. It is owned by the member states. Its commitments are governed by EU law. It publishes its operating framework. It publishes its environmental and social compliance standards. It places human rights compliance as a stated condition of financing. These are eligibility rules for public funds.
The bank has a project pipeline in Israel. The list shows several identifiable financing operations. One is the Tel Aviv Light Rail Green Line. Another is the Western Galilee Desalination Plant, associated with the State of Israel’s Ministry of Finance. Another is a lending facility routed through Bank Leumi for SMEs and green transition support. A further facility listed in 2023 under code 20230550 relates to financial inclusion and green transition. These listings all demonstrate continued structural financial cooperation.
The ICJ ruling preceded the most recent period of these projects being live on the bank’s database. The ruling imposes a duty. The duty carries liability. The liability is defined in the International Law Commission’s Articles on State Responsibility. Article 16 is the key clause. It states that a state which aids or assists in the commission of an internationally wrongful act incurs responsibility if it does so with knowledge of the circumstances of the act. The ICJ ruling is what establishes the knowledge threshold. Once the court recognised genocide as plausible, the question of knowledge ceased to be deniable. The threshold was crossed.
Then we come to the Hind Rajab Foundation, which I’ve spoken about a number of times now. Its public mission addresses accountability for the killing of a six-year-old child, Hind Rajab, her family, and the medics sent to rescue her. The Foundation was formed as a legal actor. It is not a symbolic memorial. And they have pursued individual figures worldwide for their part in the committing of genocide in Gaza, not just to the case of Hind Rajab herself, but beyond that too.
The Foundation has now filed a complaint naming the European Investment Bank itself, arguably the Foundation’s biggest case to date and I doubt you’ve heard a thing about it frankly. The complaint alleges complicity in Israeli war crimes, that is their remit after all and the Foundation published this. The complaint has now entered formal assessment. Formal assessment is not judgement. Formal assessment is the point at which an institution can no longer treat the allegation as noise. It is the moment the institution must account for its decision-making processes. That is where paper trails matter.
The paper trails of banks are not narrative. They are operational. They describe risk evaluations. They describe compliance checks. They describe screening decisions. They describe whether a financing body considered the legal environment in which it was operating. If the ICJ ruling triggered a duty of non-assistance, and the EIB continued cooperation without documented risk adjustment, the documentary record will reflect that decision. Decisions leave signatures. Compliance desks generate minutes. Authorisations create chains.
The Foundation’s filing positions the killing of Hind not as tragedy but as evidence. The evidence anchors accountability. If a war crime is specific and documented, it becomes a legal reference point. A reference point establishes foreseeability. Foreseeability is what collapses claims of ignorance. So once foreseeability is established therefore, continuing financial cooperation becomes a choice. Choices under legally binding obligations are accountable.
Now the European Investment Bank does not exist in isolation. Its financing signals are reference points for commercial lenders. When the EIB enters a country’s development pipeline, private banks read that as a stability cue. When the EIB withdraws, private banks interpret that as risk elevation. If a complaint of complicity is admitted and proceeds through formal review, the existence of the review itself changes the risk environment. That happens before any finding. The market reaction begins with the review.
There is a parallel case at the ICJ right now, that I also covered recently. Nicaragua v. Germany. The claim concerns complicity via material support. The existence of that case establishes that complicity claims are active and international. The EIB complaint sits within that same legal atmosphere. The ground rules are shared. The determining question is not whether genocide has been proven in final judgement. The determining question is whether a financing party continued cooperation after the duty of non-assistance was triggered.
The structure of complicity is an administrative one. It is processed through due diligence forms, approval panels, contracting documentation, internal reviews, and external reporting. The Foundation’s intervention forces these systems into visibility. When institutions must account for their actions, the documentation tells the story. The documentation does not take sides nor does it lie. It records who signed what, when, and under what conditions.
The Hind Rajab Foundation was created to speak with standing. The case now reaches across borders because the ICJ ruling created the legal environment that binds European institutions. The EIB is inside that environment by design.
So if the formal assessment proceeds, the next phase involves disclosure. Disclosure compels the institution to present its documentation for scrutiny. Disclosure does not depend on guilt. Disclosure is procedural. Once documentation is disclosed, journalists do not drive the narrative. The documents do. The documents show what was considered. They show what was ignored. They show whether risk was treated as real or treated as rhetorical.
The risk under examination is not reputational either, even though you would expect that to be the bit the media – if any bother to cover this – would fixate on, the bit that sells the papers. Reputational risk can be managed with statements though, which client media would no doubt happily reproduce verbatim and call it news. Legal risk cannot though. Legal risk attaches to decisions. Decisions have signatures. When decisions concern financing during a period in which genocide is under judicial examination, the signatures acquire weight. The signatures become the matter under review.
If complicity is recognised, then there will be consequences. Financing arrangements can be suspended, terminated, or restructured. Banks that read the ruling adjust exposure to avoid liability. Asset managers revise their positions to comply with fiduciary obligations. Insurers reassess coverage. These are not punitive outcomes. They are operational outcomes.
The precedent does not stop at the European Investment Bank. The moment a court recognises that a public lender has a duty to withhold financial cooperation when genocide is under judicial examination, the principle applies to intermediaries across the financial system. The Don’t Buy Into Occupation Observatory and Who Profits have documented exposure across major banks and asset managers. Barclays has held positions in Elbit Systems through asset management portfolios. HSBC has featured exposure through fund products and custodial services. BNP Paribas appears in corporate finance facilitation. Deutsche Bank appears in market clearing and custodial roles. BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street maintain index and ETF allocations to Israeli military-linked firms. These are not political alignments. They are routine financial positions. That is precisely why they matter.
If the duty of non-assistance is held to bind one institution, it binds all institutions performing comparable functions. Financial exposure is not incidental. It is a mechanism. Lending, clearing, custody, and index allocation are the infrastructure through which a state sustains operational capacity. Once genocide is recognised as plausible, those infrastructures fall under the same legal scrutiny as direct financing. The precedent is the pressure point. It extends outward on its own. It does not require campaign slogans. It does not require diplomatic negotiation. It moves through contracts, compliance desks, and risk committees. The ruling, if it comes, would not need to be loud. It would move in silence, through the balance sheets.
The significance of the complaint is structural though. It shifts the frame of accountability from battlefield to ledger for EIB and all these other banks too if the case progresses. It locates responsibility in the institutions that enable capacity. It removes the alibi of distance. It identifies complicity in the ordinary language of finance: approvals, risk profiles, exposure, eligibility.
The Foundation’s decision to target the EIB marks a threshold therefore. The threshold is the point at which genocide is not addressed as spectacle or diplomacy. It is addressed as a financing architecture that can be interrupted. The case does not need to succeed to alter the environment. It has already altered the environment by entering the assessment stage. The bank must respond. The documentation must be considered. The compliance basis must be re-evaluated.
When genocide is plausible under international law, and an institution continues cooperation with the accused state, the institution is no longer external to the event. It is positioned inside its infrastructure, it is complicit.
If the EIB is found complicit, the consequence lands on Israel. A ruling that identifies financial assistance as unlawful during an active genocide proceeding reclassifies Israel’s risk profile. That shifts how capital treats the state. Public development financing becomes restricted or withdrawn. Commercial lenders respond by tightening credit conditions. Asset managers treat exposure as a liability. Index funds rebalance. Insurers review political risk coverage. None of these processes rely on political statements. They follow from compliance.
Israel’s economy is integrated into European and transatlantic financial systems. Infrastructure projects, energy development, and military procurement rely on access to foreign credit and insurance. When that access tightens, the cost of sustaining policy escalates. The state does not lose territory. It loses affordability. The war stops being something it chooses. It becomes something it has to pay for in real time. Fundamentally if Hind Rajab succeed, the consequences for Israeli finances, with their economy already falling through the floor, could be disastrous for them. They could always stop the genocide of course.
For more on that side of this story, Israel’s economic fallout, business collapsing and investment fleeing as it is, stick with the channel and check out that story here.
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