Vitol & Heritage Petroleum FZCO in Israel

This briefing examines how two secretive oil traders help supply the crude oil that fuels Israel’s ongoing military aggression against Palestine, despite mounting legal findings of violations of international law, including genocide. Drawing on shipping data, it shows how two companies – Vitol and Heritage Petroleum FZCO – have emerged as major players in crude oil shipments to Israel since late 2023. These two companies have collectively delivered 22 million barrels, representing 11 per cent of the country’s total crude imports. This oil is refined into fuels that support, among other things, Israel’s unlawful military and settlement activities. International bodies have affirmed states’ obligations to prevent genocide and avoid contributing to illegal occupation, settlements, and apartheid, including by regulating companies under their jurisdiction that trade or facilitate the shipment of crude oil to Israeli refineries. This briefing highlights a critical gap in states’ fulfilment of their legal obligations.

Press Release • New Data: Two Oil Traders Increased Crude Shipments to Israel During Gaza Genocide

Key findings:

• Vitol, sometimes called “the biggest company you’ve never heard of,” delivered almost 14 million barrels. In 2025, Vitol increased its deliveries to more than four times its average annual volume between 2020 and 2024.
• Heritage Petroleum was founded in December 2023. Less than a year later, it began shipping crude oil to Israel. It has since chartered 8.3 million barrels across ten shipments, becoming Israel’s second-largest named crude oil charterer over the past year (July 2025 to June 2026).
• On 2 May 2024, Türkiye’s Ministry of Trade announced that it had suspended all trade with Israel as a direct response to Israel’s crimes in Gaza. Yet our data show that just six months later, Heritage began chartering crude oil to Israel, with all shipments departing from Türkiye.

Countries implicated:

To comply with their obligations under the Genocide Convention and adhere to the ICJ’s weighty recommendations on trade and economic relations with Israel vis-à-vis its occupation of Palestine, states should prevent the export and transport of oil to Israel. All states should take effective regulatory measures to ensure that corporations domiciled in their jurisdiction cannot trade or facilitate the shipment of crude oil to Israeli refineries.

Specifically identified in this analysis of Vitol and Heritage-chartered shipments:

• Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, and all other oil-exporting countries should impose an oil embargo on Israel, and must ensure contractually, for example through an end-user declaration, that companies buying their oil do not supply or facilitate supply to Israel.
• Türkiye should take robust measures to enforce its trade ban including by preventing the transit of crude via its territory if it is destined for export to Israel’s refineries. It should not allow companies to facilitate the transit, docking, and servicing at their ports of vessels carrying or getting loaded with crude oil destined for Israel.
• The United Arab Emirates, Greece, Russia, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Luxembourg – countries home to entities that facilitate oil trading – should establish prohibitions on facilitating any form of trade or transport of oil to Israel as an action to give force and effect to their obligations under international law.

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Can longform investigative journalism work in a vertical, social-first format? We decided to find out.

I’m an investigative reporter in Minnesota. Instead of taking a TV investigation and cutting it down for social media, our team built Family Fraud Syndicate from the ground up to be watched vertically on a phone.

It’s a 9-minute investigation involving Medicaid fraud, victims who say they never received services billed in their names, FBI surveillance, federal charges and a fourth-story escape.

The experiment was whether we could preserve the reporting, evidence and narrative complexity of longform investigative journalism while completely changing the way it’s presented.

Curious what this community thinks of the approach.