In compliance with a Trump administration effort to punish critics of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, YouTube has deleted the accounts of three prominent Palestinian rights groups, wiping several hundred videos documenting Israeli human rights violations in the process.
According to The Intercept, the video hosting website, owned by Google, quietly removed the accounts of three groups, Al-Haq, the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, in October.
These are the same three groups that the State Department hit with sanctions in September because they helped to bring evidence before the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The court would issue arrest warrants for the pair in 2024.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said explicitly that the groups were sanctioned because they "directly engaged in efforts by the International Criminal Court to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute Israeli nationals, without Israel’s consent.”
YouTube deleted the groups’ channels, as well as their entire archives, which contained over 700 videos that documented acts of brutality by the Israeli military against Palestinians.
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According to The Intercept, these included an investigative report about the killing of the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli troops, the military’s destruction of Palestinians’ homes in the West Bank, and a documentary about mothers who’d survived Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Google confirmed to The Intercept that it deleted the videos to comply with the State Department sanctions.
“Google is committed to compliance with applicable sanctions and trade compliance laws,” YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle said in a statement.
Katherine Gallagher, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said it was “outrageous that YouTube is furthering the Trump administration’s agenda to remove evidence of human rights violations and war crimes from public view.”
YouTube’s censorship of content deemed too supportive of Palestinians predates President Donald Trump’s return to power. In 2024, officials at YouTube and other social media companies were found to have cooperated through secretive back channels with a group of volunteers from Israel’s tech sector to remove content critical of Israel.
Following news of the three human rights groups losing their channels, documentarian and journalist Robert Inlakesh wrote on social media that in 2024, YouTube removed his channel without warning, deleting all his content, including several documentaries he’d produced in the occupied territories.
“YouTube deleted all my coverage of Israeli soldiers shooting civilians, including children targeted on a live stream, along with my entire account,” he said. “No community guidelines were violated, and three separate excuses were given to me. Then Google deleted my email and won’t respond to appeals.”
Groups sanctioned by the US for supporting the ICC have previously received preliminary injunctions in two cases, in which courts said the State Department violated their First Amendment rights.
But even with the sanctions in place, Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, said there was little legal reason for YouTube to capitulate.
“It’s really hard to imagine any serious argument that sharing information from these Palestinian human rights organizations would somehow violate sanctions,” she said. "Succumbing to this arbitrary designation of these Palestinian organizations, to now censor them, is disappointing and pretty surprising.”
Basel al-Sourani, an international advocacy officer and legal advisor for the Palestinian Center for Human Rights said that YouTube has not made it clear what policies his group’s channel violated.
“YouTube 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 October 7," he said.
“By doing this,” he added, “YouTube is being complicit in silencing the voices of Palestinian victims.”
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