LONDON: UK universities hold almost $610 million worth of investments linked to Israel, research by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign has shown.

The organization submitted freedom of information requests to universities across the UK, discovering financial ties to major Israel-linked companies including BAE Systems, Siemens and Barclays.

Student-led campaigns to divest university investments from Israel have won a series of victories in Britain and continue to gain momentum.

The PSC has led efforts to pressure universities and other institutions into abandoning financial ties to Israel.

It is part of the larger Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement launched among Palestinian civil society in 2005.

The organization received responses from 87 universities following the freedom of information request campaign and has published a database of university ties to Israel through financial investments.

“Direct complicity includes military, security, technological, financial, logistical or infrastructure support,” the PSC said.

“This information adds impetus to the growing divestment campaigns led by students and academics that have won significant concessions from university authorities in the past 18 months.”

The organization found that several universities, including the Essex, Kingston and Warwick, have invested significant funds into companies such as HSBC, Alphabet and Booking.com.

All three companies have faced criticism over their ties to Israel.

Stella Swain, the PSC’s youth and student officer, said: “It’s absolutely shameful that any university is investing in companies complicit in genocide. The fact that our universities invest £460 million ($610 million) in these corporations is an outrage.

“But students across the country are taking action to demand an end to this complicity, standing in a proud history of student resistance to occupation, colonization and apartheid.”

The organization singled out four companies with extensive ties to the Israeli military: Caterpillar, which supplies bulldozers to the IDF; BAE Systems, a key partner in the F-35 jet program; Palantir, which provides AI tools to the IDF; and Alphabet, Google’s parent company which offers cloud computing services to Israeli forces.

Several universities across the UK have made major concessions to student protesters amid mounting pressure from the BDS movement.

Swansea University in Wales committed to abandoning the £5 million it holds in Barclays Bank, while Cambridge’s Trinity College voted last year to divest its sizable investment portfolio from arms companies.

Meanwhile, the University of Portsmouth recently divested an £800,000 investment in Caterpillar following significant student pressure.

“Universities can choose to end their complicity,” Swain said. “Many have started divestment negotiations as a result of student organizing over the past two years.

“These wins show that we need to keep up the pressure until we achieve divestment at every university.”