{"id":306942,"date":"2025-11-10T12:00:35","date_gmt":"2025-11-10T12:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=306942"},"modified":"2025-11-06T06:39:29","modified_gmt":"2025-11-06T06:39:29","slug":"youtube-quietly-erased-more-than-700-videos-documenting-israeli-human-rights-violations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/11\/youtube-quietly-erased-more-than-700-videos-documenting-israeli-human-rights-violations\/","title":{"rendered":"YouTube Quietly Erased More Than 700 Videos Documenting Israeli Human Rights Violations"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Collage: The Intercept \/ Screenshots: Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights<\/p><\/div>\n

The tech giant deleted the accounts of three prominent Palestinian human rights groups \u2014 a capitulation to Trump sanctions. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

4 Nov 2025\u00a0<\/em>– A documentary featuring<\/span> mothers surviving Israel\u2019s genocide in Gaza. A video investigation uncovering Israel\u2019s role in the killing of a Palestinian American journalist. Another video revealing Israel\u2019s destruction of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank.<\/p>\n

\n

YouTube surreptitiously deleted all these videos in early October by wiping the accounts that posted them from its website, along with their channels\u2019 archives. The accounts belonged to three prominent Palestinian human rights groups: Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.<\/p>\n

The move came in response to a U.S. government campaign to stifle accountability for alleged Israeli war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.<\/p>\n

The Palestinian groups\u2019 YouTube channels hosted hours of footage documenting and highlighting alleged Israeli government violations of international law in both Gaza and the West Bank, including the killing of Palestinian civilians.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m pretty shocked that YouTube is showing such a little backbone,\u201d said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now. \u201cIt\u2019s really hard to imagine any serious argument that sharing information from these Palestinian human rights organizations would somehow violate sanctions. Succumbing to this arbitrary designation of these Palestinian organizations, to now censor them, is disappointing and pretty surprising.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants<\/a> and charged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Secretary Yoav Gallant with war crimes in Gaza, the Trump administration escalated its defense of Israel\u2019s actions by sanctioning ICC officials and targeting people and organizations that work with the court.<\/p>\n

\u201cYouTube is furthering the Trump administration\u2019s agenda to remove evidence of human rights violations and war crimes.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cIt is outrageous that YouTube is furthering the Trump administration\u2019s agenda to remove evidence of human rights violations and war crimes from public view,\u201d said Katherine Gallagher, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. \u201cCongress did not intend to allow the president to cut off the flow of information to the American public and the world \u2014 instead, information, including documents and videos, are specifically exempted under the statute that the president cited as his authority for issuing the ICC sanctions.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAlarming Setback<\/strong>\u201d<\/h2>\n

YouTube, which is owned by Google, confirmed to The Intercept that it deleted the groups\u2019 accounts as a direct result of State Department sanctions<\/a> against the group after a review. The Trump administration leveled the sanctions against the organizations in September over their work with the International Criminal Court in cases charging Israeli officials of war crimes.<\/p>\n

\u201cGoogle is committed to compliance with applicable sanctions and trade compliance laws,\u201d YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle said in a statement.<\/p>\n

According to Google\u2019s Sanctions Compliance<\/a> publisher policy, \u201cGoogle publisher products are not eligible for any entities or individuals that are restricted under applicable trade sanctions and export compliance laws.\u201d<\/p>\n

Al Mezan, a human rights organization in Gaza, told The Intercept that its YouTube channel was abruptly terminated this year on October 7 without prior notification.<\/p>\n

\u201cTerminating the channel deprives us from reaching what we aspire to convey our message to, and fulfill our mission,\u201d a spokesperson for the group said, \u201cand prevents us from achieving our goals and limits our ability to reach the audience we aspire to share our message with.\u201d<\/p>\n

The West Bank-based Al-Haq\u2019s channel was deleted on October 3, a spokesperson for the group said, with a message from YouTube that its \u201ccontent violates our guidelines.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYouTube\u2019s removal of a human rights organisation\u2019s platform, carried out without prior warning, represents a serious failure of principle and an alarming setback for human rights and freedom of expression,\u201d the Al-Haq spokesperson said in a statement. \u201cThe U.S. Sanctions are being used to cripple accountability work on Palestine and silence Palestinian voices and victims, and this has a ripple effect on such platforms also acting under such measures to further silence Palestinian voices.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which the U.N. describes<\/a> as the oldest human rights organization in Gaza, said in a statement that YouTube\u2019s move \u201cprotects perpetrators from accountability.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYouTube\u2019s decision to close PCHR\u2019s account is basically one of many consequences that we as an organisation have faced since the decision of the US government to sanction our organisations for our legitimate work,\u201d said Basel al-Sourani, an international advocacy officer and legal advisor for the group. \u201cYouTube said that we were not following their policy on Community Guidelines, when all our work was basically presenting factual and evidence-based reporting on the crimes committed against the Palestinian people especially since the start of the ongoing genocide on 7 October.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBy doing this, YouTube is being complicit in silencing the voices of Palestinian victims,\u201d al-Sourani added.<\/p>\n

Looking Outside the U.S.<\/h2>\n

The three human rights groups\u2019 account terminations cumulatively amount to the erasure of more than 700 videos, according to an Intercept tally.<\/p>\n

The deleted videos range in scope from investigations, such as an analysis<\/a> of the Israeli killing of American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh<\/a>, to testimonies<\/a> of Palestinians tortured by Israeli forces and documentaries like \u201cThe Beach<\/a>,\u201d about children playing on a beach who were killed by an Israeli strike.<\/p>\n

Some videos are still available through copies saved on the Internet Archive\u2019s Wayback Machine<\/a> or on alternate platforms, such as Facebook<\/a> and Vimeo<\/a>. The wiping only affected the group\u2019s official channels; videos which were produced by the nonprofits but hosted on alternate YouTube channels remain active<\/a>. No cumulative index of videos deleted by YouTube is available, however, and many appear to not be available elsewhere online.<\/p>\n

Videos posted elsewhere online, the groups fear, could soon be targeted for deletion because many of the platforms hosting them are also U.S.-based services. The ICC itself began exploring<\/a> using<\/a> service providers outside the U.S.<\/p>\n

Al-Haq said it would also be looking for alternatives outside of U.S. companies to host their work.<\/p>\n

YouTube isn\u2019t the only U.S. tech company blocking Palestinian rights groups from using its services. The Al-Haq spokesperson said Mailchimp, the mailing list service, also deleted the group\u2019s account in September. (Mailchimp and its parent company, Intuit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)<\/p>\n

Caving to Trump\u2019s Demand<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Both the U.S. and Israeli governments have long shielded<\/a> themselves from the ICC and accountability for their alleged war crimes. Neither country<\/a> is party to the Rome Statute, the international treaty that established the court.<\/p>\n

In November 2024, the ICC prosecutors issued arrest warrants<\/a> for Netanyahu and Gallant, charging the leaders with intentionally starving civilians by blocking aid from entering into Gaza. Both the Biden and Trump administrations rejected the legitimacy of the warrants.<\/p>\n

Since his reelection, Trump has taken a more aggressive posture against accountability for Israel. In the early days of his second term, Trump renewed sanctions against the ICC and issued new, more severe measures against court officials and anyone accused of aiding their efforts. In September, in a new order, he specifically sanctioned the three Palestinian groups<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The U.S. moves followed Israel\u2019s own designation of Al-Haq as a \u201cterrorist organization<\/a>\u201d in 2021 and an online smear campaign<\/a> by pro-Israeli activists attempting to link Palestinian Centre for Human Rights with militant groups.<\/p>\n

The sanctions freeze the organizations\u2019 assets in the U.S. and bar sanctioned individuals from traveling to the country. Federal judges have already\u00a0issued preliminary injunctions in\u00a0two cases\u00a0<\/a>in favor of plaintiffs who argued the sanctions had violated their First Amendment rights.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Trump administration is focused on contributing to the censorship of information about Israeli atrocities in Palestine and the sanctions against these organizations is very deliberately designed to make association with these organizations frightening to Americans who will be concerned about material support laws,\u201d said Whitson, of DAWN, which joined a coalition<\/a> of groups in September to demand the Trump administration drop its sanctions.<\/p>\n

Like many tech firms, YouTube has shown a ready willingness to comply with demands from both the Trump administration and Israel. YouTube coordinated with a campaign organized by Israeli tech workers to remove social media content deemed critical of Israel<\/a>. At home, Google, YouTube\u2019s parent company, secretly handed over<\/a> personal Gmail account information to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in an effort to detain a pro-Palestinian student organizer.<\/p>\n

Even before Israel\u2019s genocidal campaign in Gaza, YouTube had been accused<\/a> of unevenly applying its community guidelines to censor Palestinian voices while withholding similar scrutiny from pro-Israeli content<\/a>. Such trends continued during the war, according to a Wired report<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, YouTube shut down the official account<\/a> of the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association<\/a>. The move came after pressure from UK Lawyers for Israel<\/a>, which wrote to YouTube to point out that the organization had been sanctioned<\/a> by the State Department.<\/p>\n

Whitson warned that YouTube\u2019s capitulation could set a precedent, pushing other tech companies to bend to censorship.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are basically allowing the Trump administration to dictate what information they share with the global audience,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s not going to end with Palestine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Go to Original – theintercept.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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