YouTube: A Digital Form of Occupation Designed to Silence Palestinian Voices

For years, with a net increase since Oct 7, YouTube has quietly engaged in what digital rights groups are calling a systematic erasure of Palestinian voices. Videos documenting Israeli war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank, footage of airstrikes, home demolitions, and civilian casualties, have been vanishing from the platform. Entire channels belonging to Palestinian human rights organisations such as Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights were suspended, along with their archives and hundreds of videos that once served as vital evidence for international investigators.

YouTube has defended these removals by citing sanctions and trade compliance laws. The company claims that it must adhere to U.S. restrictions imposed during the Trump administration, which targeted several Palestinian organisations for cooperating with the International Criminal Court’s investigation into alleged Israeli war crimes. In other words, videos documenting potential atrocities were taken down not for violating YouTube’s community guidelines, but because of political designations rooted in Washington’s foreign policy.

Critics say this marks a chilling intersection of geopolitics and algorithmic power. A platform built on the promise of open expression is now intentionally enforcing the narratives of powerful states. Under pressure from both U.S. and Israeli officials, YouTube and other major tech companies have shown a willing readiness to remove content deemed critical of Israel, even when that content is factual, documentary, or journalistic in nature.

The result is a double standard that runs deep. Pro-Israel content, including inflammatory material and obvious propaganda, often remains online with minimal scrutiny. Hebrew-language videos glorifying military campaigns or mocking Palestinian suffering circulate freely, while Arabic and English-language uploads depicting the human cost of war are swiftly flagged, restricted, or deleted. One notorious example, an Israeli rap video containing explicit calls to violence, was allowed to stay up; YouTube argued it targeted “terrorists,” not Palestinians as a people. Meanwhile, Palestinian groups uploading evidence of civilian humiliation and deaths were accused of spreading “graphic violence” or “terrorist propaganda.”

This asymmetry reveals more than inconsistent moderation; it exposes a structural bias built into the very fabric of Silicon Valley’s global platforms. Algorithms designed in English, guided by Western definitions of “harm,” and informed by U.S. geopolitical priorities, inevitably weigh some lives, and some stories, more heavily than others. What is presented as a neutral enforcement of policy often amounts to a digital form of occupation: the silencing of a people’s testimony at the moment they most need to be heard.

The implications reach far beyond Gaza. By yielding to political pressure and selectively applying its own rules, YouTube is helping to shape history itself, deciding which images survive and which are erased. This kind of politicised censorship does not end with Palestine. Once the infrastructure of suppression is normalised, it can be redeployed anywhere: against whistleblowers, journalists, or dissidents whose truths unsettle the powerful.

The Sada Social Center, which was established in September 2017 with the aim of monitoring and documenting digital violations against Palestinian content, has urged for the prompt and unconditional reinstatement of the removed channels and content, along with the establishment of an independent review committee tasked with defining and monitoring the standards applied to Palestinian content. The organization calls for accountability from YouTube’s management concerning its inconsistent approach to human rights issues, while also encouraging Palestinian human rights organizations to assist in creating alternative archival platforms that are independent of U.S.-based companies, to protect the Palestinian visual memory.

In erasing Palestinian voices, YouTube isn’t just deleting videos; it’s deleting evidence, memory, and agency. And as long as Silicon Valley’s giants continue to conflate compliance with conscience, the digital public sphere will remain a battlefield, where truth itself is always at risk of being removed. The Intercept has the story…

Nikita Mazurov and Jonah Valdez report for The Intercept…

YouTube quietly erased more than 700 videos documenting israeli human rights violations

The tech giant deleted the accounts of three prominent Palestinian human rights groups — a capitulation to Trump sanctions.

A documentary featuring mothers surviving Israel’s genocide in Gaza. A video investigation uncovering Israel’s role in the killing of a Palestinian American journalist. Another video revealing Israel’s destruction of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank.

YouTube surreptitiously deleted all these videos in early October by wiping the accounts that posted them from its website, along with their channels’ 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.

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.

The Palestinian groups’ 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.

“I’m pretty shocked that YouTube is showing such a little backbone,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now. “It’s 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.”

After the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants 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’s actions by sanctioning ICC officials and targeting people and organizations that work with the court.

“It is outrageous that YouTube is furthering the Trump administration’s agenda to remove evidence of human rights violations and war crimes from public view,” said Katherine Gallagher, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “Congress did not intend to allow the president to cut off the flow of information to the American public and the world — instead, information, including documents and videos, are specifically exempted under the statute that the president cited as his authority for issuing the ICC sanctions.”

“YouTube is furthering the Trump administration’s agenda to remove evidence of human rights violations and war crimes.”

“Alarming Setback”

YouTube, which is owned by Google, confirmed to The Intercept that it deleted the groups’ accounts as a direct result of State Department sanctions 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.

“Google is committed to compliance with applicable sanctions and trade compliance laws,” YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle said in a statement.

According to Google’s Sanctions Compliance publisher policy, “Google publisher products are not eligible for any entities or individuals that are restricted under applicable trade sanctions and export compliance laws.”

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.

“Terminating the channel deprives us from reaching what we aspire to convey our message to, and fulfill our mission,” a spokesperson for the group said, “and prevents us from achieving our goals and limits our ability to reach the audience we aspire to share our message with.”

The West Bank-based Al-Haq’s channel was deleted on October 3, a spokesperson for the group said, with a message from YouTube that its “content violates our guidelines.”

“YouTube’s removal of a human rights organisation’s platform, carried out without prior warning, represents a serious failure of principle and an alarming setback for human rights and freedom of expression,” the Al-Haq spokesperson said in a statement.

“The 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.”

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which the U.N. describes as the oldest human rights organization in Gaza, said in a statement that YouTube’s move “protects perpetrators from accountability.”

“YouTube’s decision to close PCHR’s 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,” said Basel al-Sourani, an international advocacy officer and legal advisor for the group. “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 7 October.”

“By doing this, YouTube is being complicit in silencing the voices of Palestinian victims,” al-Sourani added.

Looking Outside the U.S.

The three human rights groups’ account terminations cumulatively amount to the erasure of more than 700 videos, according to an Intercept tally.

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

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

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 using service providers outside the U.S.

Al-Haq said it would also be looking for alternatives outside of U.S. companies to host their work.

YouTube isn’t 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’s account in September. (Mailchimp and its parent company, Intuit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Caving to Trump’s Demand

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

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

Since his reelection, Trump has taken a more aggressive posture against…

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Source: https://21stcenturywire.com/2025/11/05/youtube-a-digital-form-of-occupation-designed-to-silence-palestinian-voices/