Norwegian fund drops US, German companies over sales to Israeli military

By AFP 30 June 2025, 8:09 am

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The INS Rahav, a Dolphin class made by German shipbuilder ThyssenKrupp, sets off from the German port of Kiel toward Haifa, December 17, 2015. (IDF Spokesperson's Unit)

Norway’s biggest pension fund KLP says it had dropped US group Oshkosh Corporation and Germany’s ThyssenKrupp from its investment portfolio for selling weapons and equipment used by Israel’s military in Gaza.

KLP — which is separate from Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest — says Oshkosh Corporation was supplying trucks to the Israeli military, which adapts them into armored troop transport vehicles.

The fund also accused ThyssenKrupp of agreeing to supply Israel’s navy, before the outbreak of the war in Gaza, with corvettes and submarines.

“Companies have an independent duty to exercise due diligence in order to avoid complicity in violations of fundamental human rights and humanitarian law,” Kiran Aziz, head of responsible investments at KLP Asset Management, says in a statement.

KLP, which managed assets worth $114 billion in the first quarter, sold its holdings in Oshkosh Corporation valued at 19 million kroner ($1.9 million).

It also sold its investment in ThyssenKrupp worth 10 million kroner.

The two companies were excluded on the basis of KLP’s criterion relating to the “sale of weapons to states in armed conflicts that use the weapons in ways that represent serious and systematic breaches of international law governing the conflicts”, KLP said.

The fund emphasized that the two companies had long-established cooperation’s with the Israeli army, and their deliveries continued after the start of the Gaza war on October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages.