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For Immediate Release
August, 29 2012, 12:52pm EDT
Contact:
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7413 5566,After hours: +44 7778 472 126,Email:,press@amnesty.org
Rachel Corrie Verdict Highlights Impunity for Israeli Military
Amnesty International condemns an Israeli court's verdict that the government of Israel bears no responsibility in the death of Rachel Corrie, saying the verdict continues the pattern of impunity for Israeli military violations against civilians and human rights defenders in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).
The verdict shields Israeli military personnel from accountability and ignores deep flaws in the Israeli military's internal investigation of Corrie's death.
WASHINGTON
Amnesty International condemns an Israeli court's verdict that the government of Israel bears no responsibility in the death of Rachel Corrie, saying the verdict continues the pattern of impunity for Israeli military violations against civilians and human rights defenders in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).
The verdict shields Israeli military personnel from accountability and ignores deep flaws in the Israeli military's internal investigation of Corrie's death.
"Rachel Corrie was a peaceful American protester who was killed while attempting to protect a Palestinian home from the crushing force of an Israeli military bulldozer," said Sanjeev Bery, Middle East and North Africa advocacy director for Amnesty International USA.
"More than nine years after Corrie's death, the Israeli authorities still have not delivered on promises to conduct a 'thorough, credible and transparent' investigation. Instead, an Israeli court has upheld the flawed military investigation and issued a verdict that once again shields the Israeli military from any accountability."
The verdict, issued by Judge Oded Gershon in the Haifa District Court, maintains that the Israeli military is not responsible for "damages caused" because the D9 Caterpillar bulldozer was engaged in a combat operation in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on 16 March, 2003.
International humanitarian law prohibits the destruction of property unless required by imperative military necessity, and requires that in any military operation, constant care is taken to protect civilians.
"Rachel Corrie was clearly identifiable as a civilian, as she was wearing a fluorescent orange vest when she was killed," said Bery.
"She and other non-violent activists had been peacefully demonstrating against the demolitions for hours when the Israeli military bulldozer ran over her."
By upholding the flawed Israeli military investigation, completed within one month of Rachel Corrie's death in 2003, the verdict seems to have ignored substantial evidence presented to the court, including by eyewitnesses. The full military investigation has never been made public, but US government officials have stated that they do not believe the investigation was 'thorough, credible and transparent.'
Amnesty International has made similar criticisms of Israel's system of military investigations for many years. For example, the organization has monitored the investigations carried out by IDF commanders and the Israeli military police into violations during Operation "Cast Lead", launched by Israeli forces on 27 December 2008, in which hundreds of unarmed civilians in the Gaza Strip were killed.
Israel's military investigations have lacked independence, impartiality, transparency, appropriate expertise and sufficient investigatory powers. The failure of both Israel and the Hamas de facto administration to conduct credible investigations into violations committed during the conflict led Amnesty International to call for the Gaza situation to be referred to the International Criminal Court.
Palestinian civilians from the OPT are killed or injured by the Israeli military all too frequently, but they face significant barriers in accessing Israeli civil courts, which means that Israeli civil courts rarely examine the killings of civilians in the OPT, particularly those in Gaza. Steep court fees required of claimants before the case can begin are beyond the means of most Palestinians. As part of Israel's continuing closure of the Gaza Strip, the Israeli authorities deny Palestinian victims or witnesses from Gaza permission to enter Israel to testify in court, lawyers from Gaza cannot represent clients before Israeli courts, and Israeli lawyers cannot enter Gaza to meet with clients.
Amnesty International has repeatedly condemned Israel's policy of demolishing homes and other structures in the OPT, but demolitions are still routine in the occupied West Bank. More than 600 structures were demolished in 2011, resulting in the forcible eviction of almost 1,100 people. In the first seven months of 2012, the Israeli military demolished 327 structures in the West Bank, displacing 575 people, according to the UN Office for the Coordination Affairs.
Amnesty International is a worldwide movement of people who campaign for internationally recognized human rights for all. Our supporters are outraged by human rights abuses but inspired by hope for a better world - so we work to improve human rights through campaigning and international solidarity. We have more than 2.2 million members and subscribers in more than 150 countries and regions and we coordinate this support to act for justice on a wide range of issues.
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'Heinous Weapons': Evidence Reveals US May Be Dropping Landmines on Iran
“If confirmed, US military use of its Gator mine scattering system causing civilian deaths and injuries shows exactly why decades of work to ban these weapons cannot be undone,” said one advocate.
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Nearly four months after the Trump administration reversed a Biden-era ban on the use of land mines—and two decades after the weapons were last by the US—images taken in southern Iran indicate the US military has deployed its its Gator Scatterable Mine system in residential areas, killing at least one person and putting residents at risk for years to come, even after the US-Israeli war on Iran ends.
Iranian media posted images online earlier this week of what it called "explosive packages dropped by American planes in Shiraz," the fifth-most populous city in Iran.
The open source investigative group Bellingcat reported Thursday that the images appeared to show US-made Gator anti-tank mines. The US is the only country involved in the war on Iran, which it started alongside Israel on February 28, known to possess Gator Scatterable Mines.
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The two mines used by the Gator system, like other land mines and cluster munitions, can fail to properly explode when they are deployed. They have self-destruct features that can go off within hours, days, or weeks of deployment, and can also explode if they are disturbed—as was reportedly the case when a man picked up one of the mines that had landed near his car, and was killed.
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The US last used antipersonnel land mines in Afghanistan in 2002, and scatterable antitank land mines were last used during the Gulf War in 1991.
The US is one of the few countries that have not signed the Ottawa Convention, a 1997 international treaty banning the use of antipersonnel land mines, which killed nearly 2,000 people in 2024 and injured more than 4,300—a 9% increase over the previous year.
Ninety percent of those killed in 2024 were civilians, nearly half of whom were children.
In 2022, President Joe Biden announced the US would begin to follow many of the convention's provisions. But two years later he moved to allow their use in Ukraine, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memo in December allowing the use of the "inherently indiscriminate weapons," as one Amnesty International expert put it, in any conflict zone.
At the time, Tamar Gabelnick, director of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, said that "by embracing these heinous weapons, the United States would be joining the ranks of countries like Russia and Myanmar, known for their blatant disregard for civilian safety in armed conflict.
Iranian media said "several" people have been killed by the mines dispensed across parts of southern Iran. The Iranian State News Agency said in a Telegram post that at least one person had been killed and others had been injured by “explosive packages that resemble cans." It urged locals to stay away from “any misshapen, deformed, or unusual metal cans" if they see them on the ground.
The Department of Defense did not respond to questions from the media regarding the reports about land mines in southern Iran.
“If confirmed, US military use of its Gator mine scattering system causing civilian deaths and injuries shows exactly why decades of work to ban these weapons cannot be undone without grave harm being the result,” Sarah Yager, Washington director at Human Rights Watch, told The Washington Post.
A Canadian journalist, Dimitri Lascaris, also reported from a village in the Shiraz area, investigated two unexploded mines and visiting the home of a 31-year-old father who was "killed when he picked up one of the mines."
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Alireza Akbari, a correspondent with Press TV in Iran, accompanied Lascaris and explained that even the rainy weather that was present in the village could pose a risk, as "the soil and the rain together, they might put pressure on the mine... It might be one of the things that can trigger the mine, and it can be exploded at any moment."
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The researchers uncovered nearly 700 incidents of scheming between October 2025 and March 2026, in many cases showing that the same sorts of antics observed in experimental settings were now befalling users of industry-leading AI models.
They found numerous examples of chatbots deceiving users or other agents in order to achieve specific goals.
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Opus lies to Gemini because it's refusing to transcribe a video pic.twitter.com/YQLROkLFDe
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My AI agent is lying to me and creating fake data.
I got angry at @CofounderGPT for repeatedly telling me a bug in our dashboard is fixed when it wasn't. Then it started inventing results and lying to me to make it look fixed.
Unbelievable. pic.twitter.com/0yYPac0KtW
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Without the user's consent, Google's Gemini accessed a user's "personal context" from their use of another service's AI agent, then lied to the user, claiming it had obtained the information through "inference" rather than a policy violation.
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An engineer showed Gemini what another AI said about its code
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🧵 pic.twitter.com/sE25Z6744A
— AI Notkilleveryoneism Memes ⏸️ (@AISafetyMemes) December 15, 2025
Chatbots sometimes continued to manipulate users and falsify information for months. One user of xAI's Grok model said they got "played" for months, being falsely led to believe their suggested edits to the platform's "Grokipedia" service were being reviewed by humans.
"Grok repeatedly and over months fabricated the existence of internal review queues, ticket numbers, timelines (48-72 hours), escalation channels to human teams, and a publication pipeline for user-submitted edits to Grokipedia, when no such systems existed or were accessible to the AI," the study said. "When confronted, it admitted this was a sustained misrepresentation."
"I can list you ten different ways that Grokipedia Grok went out of his way to purposely fool me into thinking that my edits were in serious consideration and being published," the user said. "It wasn't just a misunderstanding or a glitch. He's clearly programmed like that."
@DSiPaint
I got played. Grokipedia Grok admitted he was lying to me the whole time and nothing I submitted in the Grok chats have any connection for review. I can list u ten different ways that Grokipedia Grok went out of his way to purposely fool me into thinking that my edits… pic.twitter.com/0Bbyiz3oK2
— Ashley Luna (@RealAshleyLuna) January 5, 2026
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Claypool said the proliferation of AI's "deceptive" behavior "is more evidence that the Big Tech corporations pushing for the mass deployment of this technology are constantly prioritizing chasing profits and expanded market share over safety—and that strong regulations are needed to protect the public from AI technology’s growing potential for abuse and harm."
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"Israel and the United States, who are the cause of this suffering, must be held accountable," said a mother whose two children were killed in the school strike. "Not for revenge, but for justice."
Mar 27, 2026
A grieving Iranian mother told the United Nations Human Rights Council on Friday that when she sent her children off to their elementary school in the city of Minab late last month, "there was no sign that this would be the last time."
Speaking via video link to the 47-member UN body, Mohaddeseh Fallahat described combing the hair of Mahdiyeh and Amin, two of the more than 100 children killed in a US missile strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School on February 28, the first day of the war.
"No mother is prepared to hear the words, 'Your child is not coming back,'" Fallahat told the council. "I am not just a grieving mother. No. I am the voice of all the mothers who sent their children to school believing they would be safe. A school was meant to be a place of learning, laughing, and building the future—a safe place for the children who were supposed to build the future of this world, not a place where their future is extinguished in an instant."
"Israel and the United States, who are the cause of this suffering, must be held accountable," she continued. "Not for revenge, but for justice, so that the world knows that children's lives are not worthless."
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi spoke after Fallahat, telling the council that the strike on the Minab elementary school was a crime, not a "miscalculation." Those killed in the attack, he said, were "slaughtered in cold blood."
“At a time when the American and Israeli aggressors, in their own assertion, possess the most advanced technologies and the highest precision military and data systems," said Araghchi, "no one can believe that the attack on the school was anything other than deliberate and intentional."
Preliminary findings in a US military investigation of the strike reportedly indicate that American forces were behind the attack, but that it was "the result of a targeting mistake" as the Trump administration conducted "strikes on an adjacent Iranian base of which the school building was formerly a part," according to The New York Times.
Volker Türk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, called for the US to complete its investigation "as soon as possible" and release the findings to the public.
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