On 16 March 2023, Amnesty International Organization published a report explaining how Israeli forces demolish homes with Hyundai CE excavators—not in Gaza, but in the West Bank, in Masafer Yatta. There has been an ongoing discussion on this matter, and Amnesty International Korea attempted to investigate this, questioning whether the Hyundai is truly complicit or aware of its destructive effect on the lives of a large percentage of the Palestinian population in Gaza and beyond. However, as highlighted by the United Nations’ ReliefWeb in a March 2025 report, Hyundai didn’t answer the questions posed by the Amnesty group in Korea, generally refusing the claims made against it and failing to face the evidence provided.

Hyundai is not alone; it is part of a network of companies that all function to damage. Specifically, there are other companies which are “profiting from the Gaza genocide,” according to the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), as reported on its website. Among the companies listed by AFSC are the British multinational company BAE Systems and the American multinational corporation BOEING. Also on the list is the U.S. construction company Caterpillar Inc., which supplies the Israeli military with construction equipment like armored bulldozers and excavators.

In this Israeli war on Gaza, the private sector has participated in accelerating the destruction alongside the bombardment. Each company that participates in this violence commits a violation against the human being who lost her or his house in Gaza. The motivation of these companies is not necessarily pro-colonization or pro-Israel, but instead pro-profit: they aim to achieve the highest profit possible, all while their equipment is used to crush people’s bodies and destroy their houses. The continued open existence of the military-industrial complex informs us that war is a field of profit-making, where companies can provide logistics to destruction just as they are able to provide logistics to build and transfer the machines or equipment of construction. Many of their tools of construction can be tools for destruction at the same time!

To inform our understanding of the horrific complicity of private companies in war, we can look at how war is presented or considered as planned architecture. This architecture of destruction is a counterpart to the architecture of construction, just as construction is a counterpart to destruction. Among the strategies of this architecture of destruction are the large-scale murder and large-scale displacement of human beings, because to destroy basically means to displace. In Gaza, we have witnessed the quick transformation of the high buildings and well-constructed urban places into unlivable rubble and empty spaces. Probably, this is part of the military technique we refer to as architecture of destruction; the climax or ultimate goal of which is complete annihilation. Gaza is quickly moving towards this final stage, as indicated by the seemingly endless evidence of tons of rubble, destroyed water lines, asphalt streets that have been crushed into dust, and most devastatingly, the mangled bodies of those human beings slain in this process of destruction.

Some say that making a profit requires breaking rules. In reality, this is the fundamental problem with business in war. In war, the rules that are broken are the rules of ethics and humanity. Without breaking those rules, there is no possibility of achieving abnormal levels of profit. Simply put, if a company wants to outperform other companies, it must do what other companies are unwilling to do, which means violating the moral standards that most of us uphold. In today’s world, military violence is still among the legitimate means of making profit; it remains so until the people join in a revolutionary uproar, one that pushes to examine and question the moral rules underlying such collaboration in war.