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weapons
A Dangerous Step Back: The Renewed Threat of Landmines and Cluster Munitions
Ninety percent of the more than 6,000 killed by landmines last year were civilians, and half of them were children. There can be no justification for weapons such as these.
Dec 01, 2025
One step can be the difference between life and death in many communities around the world. Srey Neang, a young girl living in rural Cambodia, ran outside to play in her uncle’s backyard, and her life was upended in a moment when she stepped on a landmine. She was rushed to the hospital, where her leg was amputated at only four years of age. Her story—like so many others—shows that even decades after conflict ends, the threat of these weapons never does.
Every year, thousands of civilians, particularly children, are injured or killed by landmines and cluster munitions. The use of landmines and cluster munitions had been on the decline since the signing of the Mine Ban Treaty in 1997 and the Convention on Cluster Munitions in 2010.
But despite progress, we are seeing more countries return to the use of landmines and cluster munitions as security concerns rise globally. Some will argue that these weapons make countries safer, but that’s faulty thinking. Security can’t come at the expense of innocent lives. Nor do these weapons actually provide meaningful military advantage; they leave behind contamination that destabilizes communities, limits economic recovery, and threatens peacekeeping forces long after conflicts end. You can’t be safe from a weapon that can’t distinguish between a soldier and a child.
The 2025 Landmine Monitor, out today, reports that more than 6,000 people were killed or injured by landmines and explosive remnants of war in 2024—the highest annual figure since 2020, and a 9% increase from the previous year. Ninety percent of those victims were civilians, and half of them were children. The 2025 Cluster Munition Monitor, published on September 15, also revealed that all reported casualties from this weapon in 2024 were civilians. New uses by countries like Russia, Myanmar, and Syria challenge the treaty. Lithuania’s withdrawal from the Convention, effective March 2025, sends a dangerous message to other countries in the region.
As these findings are released, there is a growing need for clear analysis and public understanding. On December 3, I’ll be joining fellow experts for a virtual briefing hosted by the US Campaign to Ban Landmines—Cluster Munition Coalition to discuss the latest Monitor reports, the human cost of these weapons, and the role US leadership must play at this pivotal moment. Bringing these insights directly to policymakers and advocates is essential to strengthening global norms and advancing effective solutions.
Despite never joining either treaty, the United States has long been one of the world’s largest supporters of mine clearance and victim assistance, helping make former battlefields safe for farming, economic investment, and community life. These investments are among the most cost-effective and high-impact uses of US international assistance, directly saving lives and restoring livelihoods.
The case for action is both moral and pragmatic. Every mine removed or cluster bomb destroyed reopens land for cultivation, enables displaced families to return home, and prevents future casualties. These are tangible, measurable outcomes that support U.S. foreign policy priorities: stability, economic recovery, and the protection of civilians in conflict.
Humanity & Inclusion, which has worked in mine action for more than 40 years, witnesses the human toll daily, as seen in the case of Srey and her family in Cambodia. The organization where I work, Humanity & Inclusion, supported Srey, now 13, in receiving a new prosthetic leg, which allows her to ride her bike to school, help take care of her family, and play soccer, one of her favorite hobbies.
Srey’s story and those of many others are reminders that behind every statistic is a person whose future depends on the choices policymakers make today. US leadership has always mattered. When the United States aligns its policies, funding, and diplomacy toward a humanitarian goal, the world follows. The US has made progress in recent years. In 2022, the Biden administration restricted US landmine use to the Korean Peninsula and reaffirmed the goal of ultimately joining the Mine Ban Treaty. But the transfer of US cluster munitions to Ukraine in 2023 and landmines in 2024, undercut those commitments and send mixed signals to the world.
US leadership in aligning policy with the Mine Ban Treaty and the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and in sustaining robust funding for mine action, comes at a critical time. Washington can once again set the global standard for protecting civilians and strengthening international law.
In a time of never-ending partisan fights, this is a place where both sides can come together and agree on the right steps forward. This is not an abstract debate. It’s about whether children can walk to school safely. Whether farmers can plant crops without fear. Whether communities emerging from war can build futures on land that no longer hides deadly remnants of the past. Eliminating landmines and cluster munitions aligns with American values, advances security, and reflects our nation’s enduring commitment to human dignity.
The world doesn’t need new reasons to fear these weapons. Instead, we must take the kind of step that brings hope rather than harm. If we lead with courage now, our next steps can help ensure that every step, everywhere, is safe.
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Dems, Do the Right Thing and Stop Funding Genocide
Show us, your constituents—who overwhelming oppose more arms to Israel—that you hear us and are willing to stand against tyranny and lawlessness wherever it exists.
May 06, 2025
On April 3, Sen. Bernie Sanders forced votes on the floor of the Senate on two Joint Resolutions of Disapproval, specifically S.J. Res. 33 and 26, each intended to stop the transfer of particular weaponry to Israel. Sadly, only 15 senators* voted for them. It is likely that one or both of your Democratic senators (if you have any) were among the 31 who voted “no,” or “present,” or simply did not vote, in effect endorsing an additional export of massive numbers of U.S.-made bombs to Israel, bombs that will be used to blow up more Palestinian civilians, along with the few homes, hospitals, schools, farms, and bakeries still standing.
The Palestinian human rights organization with which I work, like many other pro-peace, anti-genocide organizations and individuals, urgently implored our Democratic senators to vote with Sanders, hoping that their oft-stated commitment to human and civil rights might extend to Palestinians. We were disappointed in our representatives; chances are, you were as well.**
Sen. Sanders has three more Joint Resolutions of Disapproval (JRDs) in the pipeline. When--and if--they will make it to the floor for a vote is unknown, though we hope it won’t be far off. What we do know is that U.S. weapons are being used by Israel each and every day to slaughter noncombatants in Palestine. Opposing the transfer of arms in the future, arms earmarked to complete the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank, may feel like the tiniest drop in the proverbial bucket, given the rise of lawlessness, fascism, and terror at home, but the two are intimately connected. Self-evidently, state-sponsored murder and kidnapping cannot reasonably be construed to signal the collapse of democracy in one instance and the defense of it in another. Heroics, like a 25-hour speech in the well of the Senate meant to stand against the takeover of the U.S. by actors hostile to our Constitution and laws, pales in power when it is followed a mere two days later by a vote to continue to facilitate the killing of blameless children in another country.
How can voting to provide more offensive military equipment to a country that has a long track record of using U.S.-provided materiel in the commission of gross violations of human rights align with any legislator’s essential commitment to the rule of law?
With upcoming opportunities for our senators to redeem their recent votes in favor of Israeli atrocities, my organization asked them to account for those votes and offered them context both political and factual. Israeli hasbara and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee have clearly swayed their understanding and actions, and while it is an uphill struggle to counter those fraudulent narratives, we try. Another drop in the bucket? Perhaps just one small way to stand against tyranny wherever it rears its head.
The letters we sent were tailored in response to our own senators’ defense of their votes; below we have written a generic version addressed to any and all of the Democratic senators who actively chose to consign more Palestinian children to the flames, to amputation without anesthetic, to living a literal hell on earth. If you are a reader here, you almost certainly know most of what follows by rote, but we thought to gather some of the pertinent facts and language in a document that would make it simpler to approach your senator should you care to. Please feel free to copy, mine, adapt, and enrich the letter. Please… use it! While this is admittedly nowhere near enough, there are times when every drop counts.
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Senator:
Your April 3, 2025 votes on Bernie Sanders’ JRDs left me with a number of questions as well as, quite frankly, a broken heart. I wonder why, when given the chance to take a minimal step that would slow the illegal slaughter all the world sees exploding in Gaza and the West Bank, you chose to underwrite these atrocities with more U.S. weapons.
Nearly a year ago, the Biden State Department found that Israel, using U.S.-supplied weapons, likely breached international and humanitarian law. Our own “Leahy Laws” prohibit the provision of military support to countries against which there are credible allegations of “gross violations of human rights” including: extrajudicial killings; forced disappearances; torture; rape by security forces; and other forms of cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment.
Numerous documented and ultimately undisputed instances of each of these have been perpetrated by the IDF against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Recently, the Israeli military killed 15 well-identified medics in Gaza by shooting them at close range while their hands were bound, subsequently burying both the humans and their vehicles in order to hide the war crime. Just last month, the IDF shot an unarmed New Jersey teen (and American citizen) in the West Bank. Omar Mohammed Saada Rabea was hit 11 times, and while he bled to death, Israeli soldiers actively prevented the 14-year-old from receiving medical attention.
Why, then, are you voting to arm a demonstrably corrupt regime that does not seek nor have the support of its own people in this matter?
So I ask: How can voting to provide more offensive military equipment to a country that has a long track record of using U.S.-provided materiel in the commission of gross violations of human rights align with any legislator’s essential commitment to the rule of law?
Some Democratic senators have suggested that heightened threats from Iran and its proxies require the provision of more arms to Israel so that it might defend itself from foreign attack. While I am not disputing anyone’s right to defend themselves, this seems to present another confounding misalignment between stated intent and the reality represented by “no” votes on S.J. Res 33 and 26.
The first of these, S.J. Res 33, would have blocked over $2 billion for the provision of 35,000 MK 84 2,000 lb. bombs and 4,000 I-2000 Penetrator warheads.
The second, S.J.Res.26, would have stopped almost $7 billion in funding for 2,800 500-pound bombs, 2,100 Small Diameter Bombs, and tens of thousands of JDAM guidance kits.
According to Sen. Sanders, “All of these systems have been linked to dozens of illegal airstrikes, including on designated humanitarian sites, resulting in thousands of civilian casualties. These strikes have been painstakingly documented by human rights monitors. There is no debate. And none of these systems are defensive, none of them are necessary to protect Israel from incoming drone or rocket attacks.”
The weapons you voted to provide to Israel are offensive weapons, not defensive in nature. Israel has demonstrated again and again that it is more than willing to use U.S.-supplied offensive weaponry to illegally kill, maim, and terrorize innocent civilians. A claim of self-defense against Hamas strains credulity when the death tolls as of over a month ago were: 50,021 Gazans (with actual numbers estimated as high as 250,000), and 1,605 Israelis. If it were up to me, no one would die in war. But the argument that the assault on Gaza is defensive lost any claim to legitimacy long since. True defensive weaponry, such as David’s Sling and the Iron Dome, have not been implicated in any of Sen. Sanders’ JRDs.
I would simply contend that additional lethal arms in the hands of a government that has used these same offensive weapons virtually every single day of the last 565—in clear violation of U.S. and international laws, as well as their own negotiated cease-fire agreements—is not the best way to support Israel’s security. If an Iranian attack is your concern, there are many other avenues to pursue that would directly support Israel’s ability to avoid or prevail in such a conflict. Israel, to date, has given the U.S. absolutely no reason to believe it will use further armaments to defend itself against Iran, and daily arguments to support the expectation that it will use them to kill Palestinian civilians and remove them from their homeland. Israel’s actions must be taken as the measure of their intent.
It is also worth noting that a recent poll by Israeli TV 12 found that 70% of Israelis do not trust their own government and, in opposition to the Netanyahu government’s push to fight on, want a deal with Hamas to end the war. In fact, increasing numbers of Israeli soldiers are declining to fight in a war they understand is being waged to solely benefit the president and his cronies instead of the country they have vowed to serve and protect.
Why, then, are you voting to arm a demonstrably corrupt regime that does not seek nor have the support of its own people in this matter?
Were you aware that here in the U.S., a March 2025 Economist/YouGov poll (page 90) found that just 15% of the American people support increasing military aid to Israel, while 35% support decreasing military aid to Israel or stopping it entirely? Only 8% of Democrats polled supported increasing military aid to Israel at this time.
In addition, a November 2024 J Street poll of Jewish voters tallied 62% of American Jews supporting withholding “shipments of offensive weapons like 2,000-pound bombs until Prime Minister Netanyahu agrees to an American proposal for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza in exchange for a release of Israeli hostages.”
Sen. Sanders’ JRDs do not undermine Israel’s right to exist or to defend itself. They attempt, rather, to bring the U.S. into compliance with its own laws, and in my view, actually support an ally by refusing to enable its illegal and immoral actions. History has shown us again and again that the road to peace and stability is not one that can feasibly be built upon a foundation of war crimes and the slaughter of a civilian population.
As Jack Mirkinson, an editor at The Nation wrote:
The violence is the direct result of some very basic realities—namely, that Israel has been occupying Palestine for 75 years, has been killing and oppressing Palestinians for just as long, and has created the world’s most enduring apartheid state. And the only thing that will really put a stop to the violence is if those conditions are ended. That’s really all there is to it. You can go through all of the twists and turns since 1948, but if you don’t come back to that fundamental truth, there’s no real conversation to have.
Sen. Sanders will undoubtedly be asking for your vote on further JRDs in the future, each of them targeting the sale of arms which Israel has habitually used to kill innocent civilians (including Americans) in both Gaza and the West Bank. I sincerely hope that you will reconsider sending more offensive weapons to Israel and will co-sponsor Sen. Sanders’ JRDs, or at very least vote against expanding U.S. complicity in Israel’s illegal assault on the people of Palestine. Show us, your constituents—who overwhelming oppose more arms to Israel—that you hear us, and perhaps most importantly, that you have the integrity to stand against tyranny and lawlessness wherever it exists.
Senator, do the right thing.
Sincerely,
A Heartbroken Voter
*Voted Yea: Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Andy Kim (D-N.J.), Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Peter Welch (D-Vt.). If one of these folks is your senator, a thank you would not go amiss.
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Netanyahu Came to Congress to Plead for More Arms; Lawmakers Must Say No
An immediate end to all U.S. weapons transfers to Israel is long overdue, alongside a permanent cease-fire and larger pursuit of freedom and justice for the Palestinian people.
Jul 26, 2024
In a shameful moment for U.S. history, an accused war criminal addressed Congress on July 24.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to plead for more arms for his war on Gaza, where the International Court of Justice ordered it to “prevent” the act of genocide. “Give us the tools faster and we’ll finish the job faster,” Netanyahu said.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) is seeking a warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest for war crimes and crimes against humanity. But instead of arresting him, Congress gave him multiple standing ovations.
Beyond applause, the U.S. government is also Israel’s chief supplier of arms. Every year, Congress sends billions in military aid—including thousands of high powered explosives and other weapons since October.
To avoid complicity in war crimes and genocide, these shipments must end.
The voices of the American people deserve more respect in Congress than Netanyahu’s lies and demands.
There is overwhelming evidence that Israeli forces under Netanyahu’s leadership have committed massive human rights atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza. And that’s against the backdrop of an illegal military occupation of Palestinian territory and apartheid, as another ICJ ruling confirmed recently.
Nonetheless, Congress invited Netanyahu to speak. He used this platform to deny any responsibility for the slaughter, famine, and catastrophic destruction in Gaza—and to denigrate Americans who are rightly horrified by their government’s support for his genocidal campaign.
As Netanyahu spoke, thousands of people took to the streets near the Capitol. Braving tear gas and arrest, they gave voice to the majority of Americans who demand an immediate, permanent cease-fire in Gaza and an embargo on arms to Israel.
Most Americans are disgusted that U.S-made bombs keep turning up at massacre after massacre. Over the past few weeks alone, Israel has repeatedly bombed so-called “safe zones” and at least eight schools in Gaza where thousands of forcibly displaced Palestinians were sheltering.
On July 9, the Israeli military murdered at least 30 Palestinians who were playing soccer at the Al-Awda school using GBU-39 bombs made by Boeing. Israel also dropped GBU-39s on another U.N. school-turned-shelter in the Nuseirat refugee camp on July 6, killing at least 40, and before that on Palestinian families sheltering in plastic tents during the May 26 Rafah massacre.
On July 13, Israeli forces killed 90 people and injured hundreds more at the Al-Mawasi refugee camp that Israel had designated a “safe zone.” Children were reportedly found “in pieces.” Eight 2,000-pound bombs turned the civilian area into a “smoldering crater.” At least one of the munitions was a Boeing-made JDAM.
Despite these atrocities, the weapons continue to flow.
In May, U.S. President Joe Biden announced that he would pause the delivery of 2,000-pound bombs ahead of Israel’s invasion of Rafah, which Biden had called “a red line.” However, Israel has still received destructive 500-pound bomb shipments despite invading Rafah, and the killing in Gaza continues.
These weapons shipments violate both international and U.S. law. The United States is legally obligated to withhold military assistance when U.S. weapons are used to violate human rights.
The U.N. Human Rights Council and various experts have called on all countries to end the sale and transfer of military equipment to Israel—or else risk complicity in crimes, including genocide. They called on arms manufacturers supplying Israel to do the same, including Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman.
Polls show that a majority of Americans support closing the arms pipeline to Israel. In advance of Netanyahu’s speech, seven major labor unions representing nearly 6 million workers called on President Biden to “immediately halt all military aid to Israel.”
The voices of the American people deserve more respect in Congress than Netanyahu’s lies and demands. An immediate end to all U.S. weapons transfers to Israel is long overdue, alongside a permanent cease-fire and larger pursuit of freedom and justice for the Palestinian people.
We must not allow ourselves to become a nation that applauds mass murder.
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