Authorities in Buenos Aires have suspended a proposed $170m water treatment plant deal with Israeli state water firm Mekorot after a campaign by local trade unions and human rights groups over its role in Israeli apartheid and Israel’s theft of Palestinian water sources.

Friends of the Earth Palestine and a range of BDS partners are calling for a week against Mekorot during the last week of March.

Luxembourg’s state pension fundhas excluded nine major Israeli banks and firms and one US company because of their involvement in Israeli settlements and human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The move follows similar steps taken by other major financial institutions including the Dutch pensions giant PGGM and Norway’s state pension fund. New research suggests that as many as one in seven Dutch institutional investors have excluded companies involved in the Israeli occupation of Palestine in the course of the last five years.

The student union at the University of Kent in the southeast of England is to terminate its contract with G4S following an “outcry” over its role in human rights abuses in Palestine.

G4S provides security “services” to Israeli military bases, checkpoints, illegal settlements and prisons at which Palestinian political prisoners are held without trial and subjected to abuse and torture.