A years-long campaign for pro-Palestine divestment has scored a quiet, consequential victory: the United Kingdom’s largest public sector pension pool, Border to Coast Pensions Partnership, secretly sold off all its Israeli government bond holdings in 2025 following months of escalating grassroots pressure, an investigation by Middle East Eye can exclusively reveal.
Headquartered in Leeds, Border to Coast manages close to £120 billion ($160 billion) in retirement assets on behalf of roughly two million local government public sector workers across 18 regional UK pension funds. What has not been reported publicly until now is that between September 2024 and March 2025, the fund acquired $29.2 million in Israeli government bonds through its third-party asset manager, PIMCO—the world’s largest active bond manager, based in Newport Beach, California and owned by German financial giant Allianz. The purchases came months after the International Court of Justice issued a landmark ruling finding it plausible that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, at a time when grassroots divestment pressure was already building across multiple UK local government pension schemes.
This purchase made Border to Coast the largest buyer of Israeli government bonds among UK public institutions tracked in an exclusive dataset compiled by Amsterdam-based research firm Profundo, which documents Israeli bond acquisitions between 2024 and 2026. It ranked third among all UK investors, behind only British corporate giants Aviva and HSBC.
When pro-Palestine campaigners in South Yorkshire, one of the regions whose pension assets are managed by Border to Coast, uncovered the bond purchases through freedom of information-style requests, they launched a sustained public pressure campaign. In June 2025, the South Yorkshire Pensions Divest for Palestine Campaign delivered a 7,500-signature petition to the South Yorkshire Pensions Authority (SYPA), calling for an immediate sale of the holdings. Protesters gathered outside a key SYPA meeting, with chants so loud attendees inside struggled to conduct business. The campaign won further backing when Sheffield City Council passed a unanimous “Not In Our Name” motion calling for action on divestment that September.
Sue Owens, a spokesperson for the South Yorkshire campaign, told Middle East Eye that the discovery of the bond purchases was deeply alarming for local pension holders. “When we found that Border to Coast held Israeli bonds we were appalled to think that pensioners’ money was directly helping to fund genocide, apartheid, occupation, incarceration and torture,” Owens said. “We were even more shocked when we realised the bonds had been bought while the genocide was ongoing.”
The layered structure of the UK’s public pension system created unique barriers to action. SYPA, which represents South Yorkshire’s local government workers, could not directly order Border to Coast to sell the bonds. Border to Coast, which delegated day-to-day bond management to PIMCO, could pressure the asset manager but could not unilaterally override PIMCO’s investment decisions. For months, SYPA pushed Border to Coast for answers, which in turn pressed PIMCO, which initially defended the purchases as based on Israel’s strong credit rating and macroeconomic fundamentals.
At a public meeting in early September 2025, Border to Coast CEO Rachel Elwell acknowledged shared frustration with PIMCO’s lack of transparency, but framed divestment from Israeli bonds as far more complex than divestment from Russian assets following the invasion of Ukraine. Unlike Russia, she noted, there was no clear international consensus or UK government sanctions on Israel, creating regulatory uncertainty for institutional investors. Andrew Strone, SYPA’s assistant director of investment strategy, echoed that point, saying the UK government’s refusal to impose sanctions on Israel, as it did on Russia, left institutions without clear policy guidance to justify a sale.
Weeks after that meeting, in late September 2025, PIMCO sold off all of Border to Coast’s Israeli bond holdings. No public announcement was made, and no official explanation for the sale has been issued. Behind closed doors ahead of the sale, campaigners who met Border to Coast leadership at the fund’s annual general meeting reported that executives privately admitted concerns over reputational damage and did not reject the ethical arguments for divestment, but declined to publicly endorse the campaign’s position.
When contacted by MEE, a Border to Coast spokesperson confirmed the sale, but would not confirm whether activist pressure had driven the decision. The spokesperson alluded to environmental, social and governance (ESG) risk considerations, saying: “We continue to monitor the impact of the Israel-Gaza conflict on investment portfolios in line with our consideration of ESG issues and our responsible investment policies.” The fund also confirmed it has hired Dutch asset manager Robeco, a pioneer in ESG due diligence for Israeli-Palestinian investments, to conduct human rights reviews of its holdings.
Border to Coast’s quiet divestment is a significant milestone: only a small number of major UK institutional investors have sold Israeli assets in recent years, despite mounting allegations of Israeli war crimes in Gaza. The Universities Superannuation Scheme, the UK’s largest private pension fund, previously divested following pressure from academic unions, while London’s local government pension vehicle sold £6.7 million in Israeli bonds in 2024 but remains under pressure over other Israel-linked holdings. In all of these cases, institutions have declined to explain their decisions publicly, often only citing vague “financial risk management” when pressed.
This pattern suggests that pro-Palestine activist pressure, paired with growing ESG scrutiny of human rights risks, is shifting institutional investment decisions even as institutions avoid public debate to escape political and regulatory backlash. The case of Border to Coast also lays bare the contradictory legal and political landscape that has forced UK institutions into silence on Palestinian human rights, even as they have spoken out publicly and acted quickly on divestment from Russian assets following the invasion of Ukraine.
The UK’s Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS), of which Border to Coast is the largest constituent pool, has 6.9 million members nationwide. The Scheme Advisory Board (SAB), which oversees the LGPS, wrote to UK Local Government Minister Alison McGovern last October asking for explicit guidance on whether holding Israeli conflict-linked investments creates legal liability for pension funds, pointing out that the UK government had issued clear guidance on Russian investments following the invasion of Ukraine.
McGovern only responded seven months later, and her answer offered little clarity for campaigners. She wrote that divestment and boycott decisions fall under central government foreign policy, and that it “is not appropriate for local authorities to adopt investment policies that go beyond or differ from UK Government sanctions or foreign policy positions.” Since the UK has not imposed sanctions on Israel, this guidance effectively discourages divestment—though McGovern added that institutions can adjust strategies for financial reasons related to fiduciary duty, leaving a narrow legal opening for divestment framed around risk rather than politics. The response did, however, mark a rare acknowledgement at the ministerial level that pro-Palestine activist pressure has become a consequential force shaping institutional investment decisions.
The divestment by Border to Coast comes as pressure on European financial institutions to cut ties with Israeli investments is accelerating. In August 2025, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund divested from 11 Israeli companies and excluded Caterpillar and five major Israeli banks over their links to illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. In September 2025, the Central Bank of Ireland paused its approval of Israeli bond prospectuses, while a Danish academic pension fund formally excluded Israel and Israeli state-controlled companies from its portfolio.
Despite the sale of its Israeli government bonds, Border to Coast still holds investments in three companies listed on the UN database of businesses operating in illegal Israeli settlements: Airbnb, Booking.com and Bank Leumi. The fund told MEE it has been engaging with these companies to address ESG concerns since 2025, and the South Yorkshire divestment campaign says it will continue to press for full divestment from all Israel-linked assets tied to human rights abuses.