Crow wrote and read their testimony in English, and the court interpreter translated it into German. Any errors have been intentionally retained for authenticity
I am here today as a member of the global community that stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people and land. We are a community that acknowledges and resists against the 70 years of illegal occupation, the apartheid regime and the multiple genocides that have been committed and are currently ongoing in Palestine at the hands of the Zionist entity referred to as Israel. We are a community that since 2023 has witnessed thousands of violations of international law by the IDF and Netanyahu be justified by the German government and legal system.
Your inaction has forced our hand. We demand not only a real end to the current genocide, and efforts to establish the foregrounds for a Palestinian state, but we also demand that all land stolen by the state and settlers be returned to Palestinians, accountability be taken by those who have acted in and fueled war crimes, and reparations for Palestinians to rebuild their land and to heal from the last 70 years of violence.
To understand my motivation for this action we undertook against Elbit Systems, it is essential that we bring the context of what has unfolded in Palestine in the most recent two-year genocide in Gaza and the 70 years of occupation. Though I will not be able to convey the true history and the pain that Palestinians have lived through, I will reiterate and summarise the words of Ahmed Alnaouq, a Palestinian man, that recall what he and his family lived through.
The Israeli forces struck first in 1948, on the day we know as Nakba, in which Palestinians, who were previously under British colonial rule, were now being bombed from above by a new colonial enterprise. It is reported that hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives or were displaced from their lands under the threat of death.
Israel created settlements and restricted access of Palestinians to their land. Twenty years later, Israel expanded its occupation in what is known as the Six-Day War of ‘67, in which tanks were introduced to murder innocent Palestinians and used to occupy the Gaza Strip, the Sinai, the Golan Heights, and southern Lebanon. He recalls his mother’s description of Israeli forces shooting indiscriminately through the streets, witnessing soldiers digging holes in walls of schools to shoot Palestinian children for sport, and his aunt recalls seeing soldiers betting on the gender of a baby still inside of a martyred Palestinian pregnant woman before slicing her belly open to find out. From the Six-Day War, Israel further consolidated the apartheid regime by sectioning off certain areas through the use of checkpoints, and deliberately undermining local economies to foster dependency on occupation forces. Palestinians employed by Israeli companies were subject to humiliating strip searches by IDF soldiers and detained for hours in IDF checkpoints for no reason on the way to work.
His father recalls his Israeli boss saying: “God created Israelis as humans and the rest as animals to serve them. Israelis were disgusted with the animals and asked God to transform them into human beings and that’s how you came to be.” A statement and thought that is still expressed by the then Zionist Defense Minister Gallant when he declared in October 2023: “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” A year before the Six-Day War, Elbit Systems, arms manufacturer of the IDF, was created specifically with the task of producing and developing weaponry to murder and oppress Palestinians and solidify and maintain the apartheid regime of the Israeli government and forces.
In 1987, with the escalating harassment by Israeli forces, the deaths of six Palestinians sparked the first Intifada by the Palestinian population demanding an end to the occupation and the second-class citizenship that was written and acted on through Israeli law. The Israeli military responded with mass arrests, curfews, violent crackdowns on freedom of movement which led to further economic strife and social unrest.
In 1994 under pressure from the international community the Oslo Accords were signed by both Israeli authorities and the Palestinian Authority stipulating the establishment of a Palestinian state by 1999 at the latest, which to this day Israel has refused to abide by. It stipulated areas that Palestinians would control and in theory be free of Israel’s authority.
Israel’s refusal to abide by the Oslo Accords and allow a Palestinian state sparked the second Intifada in September 2000 in which again the Palestinians called for freedom, an establishment of their own state, and to live in dignity. The Israeli response was devastating, with the use of tanks, Apache helicopters and weapons developed and supplied by Elbit Systems to suppress the calls for freedom.
In 2007 Gaza fell under a total Israeli blockade, in which access to food, water, gas, electricity were deprived by Israeli forces. A two-year genocide followed in which Israeli forces used internationally prohibited chemical weapons like white phosphorus on the civilian population. This war took the lives of 1,400 Palestinians, injured 5,000, and destroyed 47,000 homes. In 2014 Israel launched another unprovoked attack on Gaza resulting in 2,300 deaths. Following the 13 year siege on Gaza, Palestinians decided to protest peacefully along the apartheid wall built around them. It was a demand for the right to return to the land they had lost from the Nakba until the date it occurred in 2018. Israel responded by killing 300 Palestinians, two journalists, and countless paramedics, and introduced new weapons like the exploding butterfly bullet, resulting in 300 amputees.
Then, in October 2023 Israel launched its most brutal assault on the people of Gaza and increased the acceleration of its colonial endeavour in the region dramatically. To date, sources show that in the last two years at least 72,000 innocent civilians have been martyred of which 30–40,000 are children, they have and are currently starving the people of Gaza, refusing adequate aid into Gaza and refusing medical evacuations of 21,000 people in critical condition in Gaza. In the last two years we have seen the bombing of civilian infrastructure including houses, hospitals, schools, places of worship; we have seen strikes on first responders, the weaponising of food and medical supplies, 300 journalists have lost their lives, families have been displaced multiple times after being issued illegal evacuation orders from Israel and then being targeted at the displacement camps.
The list goes on, all red lines have been crossed, and Israel’s impunity only gets stronger. Dr. Ghassin recollects operating on a child after an explosion on a house that had killed all family members and relatives of the three-year-old. He recollects hospital capacities and equipment running so low that family members had to choose which relatives to save and which to leave to die.
Not only in Gaza have effects been felt, but throughout the occupied Palestine, Israeli forces have been raiding villages and cities in the West Bank, stealing all foreign currencies from banks owned by Palestinians, demolishing houses and farms that have been lived on by Palestinians for centuries and funding and arming settler-militias to build illegal settlements in their wake. Palestinian political prisoners that are held in Israeli prisons are subject to torture and indignity in prison. A video was released by an Israeli lawyer of a Palestinian prisoner being sexually assaulted by an IDF soldier, the lawyer was labeled as antisemitic and a traitor to Israel whilst the rapist was named a hero by the Israeli Defence Minister.
The Israeli Zionist agenda has been clearly stated by both Israeli ministers and American officials, Israel will not stop until it has control over the entire Palestinian land, ethnically cleansed Palestinian people, and until it has achieved its bigger picture expansion to create a “Greater Israel” in which it controls the entire Middle East. It continues to violate ceasefire deals and treaties like the one in October last year, killing close to 800 people since its signing. Though the killing by the IDF may have slowed down since the ceasefire, settler attacks and landgrabs in the first four months of 2026 were larger than the entirety of the last years’ settler attacks. The legislated grip and apartheid regime has only strengthened since the ceasefire, seen in the Knesset’s decision to reinstate the death penalty, a sentence only given to Palestinians, and the Knesset’s decision to turn Palestinian territory, for example the West Bank, into state owned property.
From what I read in German newspapers, what I hear in speeches from politicians and from what is stated in the indictment written by the prosecutor, there is a false notion that the history of this two-year genocide called a “conflict” started on October 7th. With the context I have transmitted here, my motivation for this action should not only be understandable but also necessary considering the 70 years of unanswered calls for freedom and sovereignty for the Palestinian people.
My motivation to undertake this political action against Elbit Systems stems from the silence of the German state in the face of Israeli atrocities and from the understanding that no matter how many red lines are crossed and war crimes committed, the German and Israeli states choose profits over the lives of Palestinians; therefore minimising these profits would pressure the state to rethink its actions. We protested multiple times a week demanding at the very least sanctions from the German state on Israel and to hold companies that supply and fuel Israel’s genocide, such as Elbit Systems, accountable for their direct role. We held protest camps outside the Bundeskanzleramt [Federal Chancellery] for months, literally chanting our demands to Chancellor Merz only for him to leave his balcony and go back inside. We made petitions. We sent direct emails to government officials. We participated in local boycott and sanction campaigns of Israeli companies profiting off of Palestinian suffering. No method that was in line with German law worked, and the death toll in Gaza only increased as our demands were conveyed. The German state made itself clear: it would protect the companies that armed a military undertaking, a genocidal company, over the protection of Palestinian rights.
The German legal system also showed its true colours as a vehicle to legitimise this violent policy of the state and incriminate those calling for an end to the genocide. We did not wake up and act in a “blind rage” as the prosecutor noted in the indictment, we reflected on our two years of campaigning and came to the conclusion that the enormous profits that companies like Elbit, and states like Germany, are accumulating from this genocide are far too large for them to voluntarily give up. We realised that Germany and Elbit are guided by a compass based on profits rather than morality. We realised that the only way to reduce the killing and martyrdom of our brothers and sisters in the Gaza Strip was to directly encroach on these profits and prevent the shipping of weapons from Germany to the Gaza strip.
Outside of the direct effect our action would have in contributing to the end of the most recent genocide, my motivation was to have these court proceedings in which the nature and ethos of Elbit Systems and position of Elbit Systems within the Israeli state structure can be brought to light in the hopes that action will be taken against it. We know that Elbit Systems is the direct associate of a PM and Ministers that have been issued arrest warrants by the International Court of Justice and we know that Elbit Systems is the main supplier of weapons and technology of the IDF.
But Elbit Systems also directly encourages and advocates for the continuation of a genocide in Gaza as they see Gaza as a weapons testing side and a laboratory. Throughout the genocide committed over the years on Palestinian people, the international community has given a free pass to Israel and thus Elbit to use any weaponry it chooses to crush and murder Palestinians. A free pass stemming from the fear of coming under attack from the Israeli lobby, and from the false labeling of governments that stand as anti-Zionist as antisemitic. Gaza is virtually defenceless and due to its blockade by Israel cannot receive any weaponry or other means to defend itself with. Elbit takes advantage of this free pass and the enclosure of Palestinians in Gaza with nowhere to escape, to test its latest developments in weaponry and technology to receive its “battle tested” status with minimal to no losses or damage to its equipment.
With this “combat proven” status achieved from senseless killing of Palestinians, Elbit can then sell its weaponry to other nation states and private militias in Europe and to the USA at a much higher price. The evidence for this can be seen in the development and use of the “Hermes” drone by Elbit in Gaza used to attack schools, hospitals, homes, and kill innocents. After it achieved its battle status in Gaza it was then modified and sold to the British military and mass produced by a subsidiary company in the UK, and used in military opps by the British in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even in the current genocide on Palestinians Gaza, Elbit is testing it s autonomous-AI-controlled drones before selling the software to European countries through subsidiaries like the factory in Ulm. Elbit is expanding into Europe firstly to build its weapons away from the instability of the Middle East but also to access new markets. Factories like the one in Ulm were built and maintained by the killing of Palestinians and new profits coming out of these factories go out to maintain the apartheid regime.
The hand that Elbit Systems has in this 70 year occupation and most recent genocide of Palestinians is much larger than a private arms provider with no knowledge of the atrocities enacted with its weapons, the direct role in operations can be seen in an Israeli General’s direct quote in which he states: “We operate day and night in cooperation with unit 9900, Elbit, and the administration to perfect the systems…we carried out 30 operations.”
My motivation for this action was to have this court date and shed light on the inner working of Elbit Systems in the hopes that the courts will take action against it and stop it of the use Palestinian people as a testing ground, stop its encouragement of the genocide in Gaza, and to stop its profiteering off an illegal occupation.
My motivation surfaced from the reality of where the power and decision making actually lie in our society, and this power is acted on outside of legal or governmental oversight, and is in the hands of the arms dealers. Our domestic politics and foreign policy undertaken by governments globally are heavily influenced by the transnational network of private arms manufacturers that are enmeshed within our government structures, and lobby and promote the manufacturing of wars, genocides, increased police repression, and colonisation of Global South lands and people that result in enormous profits for these companies that supply them.
The governments justify and camouflage their fulfillment of these profit driven aims set by the private arms dealers through the manipulation of pre-existing social constructs and divisions based on race, gender, sex, or through the labeling of groups opposing these agendas as “terrorists”. This methodology and manufacturing of a culture of fear disguises their atrocities as acts of “national security” or “self-defense”.
From the 70 year occupation and multiple genocides in Palestine to the mass killings and years of neglect of Kurdish peoples’ rights to life and to their land, to the foreign funded wars in Congo and Sudan that have killed hundreds of thousands of innocents and displaced millions.
All of this pain and suffering I explained above was orchestrated, profited from, and lobbied into action by the Lockheed Martins, the Rheinmetalls, the BAE Systems, the Boeings, and the Elbit Systems. They prevent our society from achieving real democracy. This action was a part of a global movement that aims to reduce violence at its source. They choose profits over the lives of our peoples. My motivation for this action was when I saw the courts, the police, and other state apparatus working side by side with, and following directions from, these companies, to operate with this agenda and protect their right to do so.
If you will not hold these companies accountable, then the people will.
