Namecheap.com, the popular domain name and webhosting platform, has disabled the Genocide.live domain name, which was home to a publicly accessible archive of over 16,000 videos documenting alleged Israeli war crimes, the vast majority of which were recorded since the onset of the war on Gaza in late 2023. The archive, formerly known as TikTokGenocide, was previously submitted as “evidence on the State of Israel’s acts of genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza” by the South African UN delegation to the United Nations Security Council in February of 2025 and is also included in ongoing court proceedings of the International Court of Justice case South Africa (et. al.) v. Israel.
In a New Year’s tweet earlier today, the maintainer of the site going by the alias of Zionism Observer on Twitter detailed the suspension (with the registrar placing the domain under a clientHold suspension) of the Genocide.live domain name, under the seemingly ridiculous claim of its hosting material that “promotes, encourages, engages or displays cruelty to humans or animals:”
It’s true that the site’s content did indeed depict gross violations of human rights (along with 70+ videos of animal rights violations), but it could not be honestly (or even mistakenly) described as being posted for purposes of “promoting, encouraging,” or glorifying such violations – an accusation much akin to doggedly accusing Wikipedia of being a pornography site because it contains medical and anatomical depictions of the human body. The maintainer has also clarified that all sensitive videos and imagery were placed behind a click-to-view overlay with a warning about the violent or triggering nature of the content.
While the site has been reportedly mirrored and backed up to multiple locations, there remain obvious problems with this seizure. As various links to individual videos from the archive – all now broken – have been entered into evidence with various international and supranational courts in multiple ongoing proceedings opened against the State of Israel (and, separately, individual Israeli soldiers) over the past couple of years, the takedown of the domain could have severe legal ramifications, if not rectified posthaste, – and could potentially open Namecheap to accusations of obstruction of justice, which their General Counsel might wish to consider.1
A citation of the Genocide.live archives in legal proceedings accusing Israel of war crimes and genocide in Gaza, provided by the site’s maintainer.
An instance of Genocide.live, née TikTokGenocide.com, in UN Security Council proceedings from February 2025.
The archive had already come into the legal spotlight earlier last year, when it was forced to change from its original name of TikTokGenocide to Genocide.live after cease-and-desist requests from the new owners of the popular social media platform targeted its use of the domain name – despite its arguably fair-use claim to the name.2
Namecheap is no stranger to accusations of frivolous or unjustified domain name suspensions – a search on Reddit reveals hundreds of such complaints in recent years – but neither are any of the other large domain name registrars exempt from reports of such behavior. The site’s maintainer suggests that the decision to suspend the domain over the New Years holiday might not have been coincidental, as it robbed them of a 48-hour notice of impending revocation (with, apparently, no option to appeal or contest the charges), during which time they might have been able to transfer the domain to a different registrar.
The seizure of the domain has gone somewhat viral on Twitter, where it has become a trending topic with users speculating on the motivation and suggesting that the domain registrar might have been the target of an email campaign by those unhappy with the archive’s existence or growing prominence.
In addition to hosting over 16,000 videos of evidence documenting evidence of war crimes by Israeli soldiers and examples of intent of genocide from Israeli military and civil leaders, the Genocide.live archive also included an interactive map of Gaza detailing IDF violations against the populace in each area, a geolocated index of the videos for which location data was positively determined, a categorized listing of videos detailing the nature of violations, an extensive index of the different types of victims of Israeli agression, a cross-indexed reference of various weapons of war used, and, perhaps most sensitively of all, a cross-indexed list of individual IDF brigades and battalions tied to each of the hosted pieces of evidence, where that information was available.
The site’s maintainer noted with concern an anomaly in the traffic the archive was receiving from Israel, and had earlier reported recent attempts to probe their infrastructure from the same.
Genocide.live is a part of the Databases for Palestine project, a collective founded in December of 2023 using tech to shed light on the terrible situation in Gaza and the acts of the Israeli government and army that contributed to Israel being credibly accused of committing genocide in Palestine by prominent human rights organizations including Amnesty International, Médecins Sans Frontières, and Human Rights Watch, among others.
Requests for comment from Namecheap have not yet been met with a response.
Update January 5, 2026
Following approximately 96 hours of downtime, the Genocide.live video archive is now accessible once more. Namecheap agreed to un-suspend the domain in response to significant social media backlash, but refused to continue acting as the archive’s registrar. After some extended back-and-forth, the registrar-enforced clientTransferProhibited was ultimately removed, allowing the site’s maintainers to move the domain to Trustname, their new registrar.
Interestingly, Namecheap does not publicly name their Chief Legal Officer/General Counsel, leading even the Office of the Attorney General of the State of New York to leave them unnamed in previous legal petitions. ↩
The previous name was a not unsubtle jab at the public broadcasting of war crimes by IDF soldiers as they boasted about the destruction they wrought in Gaza. ↩
Namecheap also advertises itself as being for “net neutrality” and for “due process”. I’ve been a customer for 20 years. This regression is so off brand for them. Clearly they are not aware of the Manila Principles on “intermediary liability” supported by the organizations they claim to align with.
Why not just switch tp a different provider?
Dave, it’s mentioned tangentially in the story but Namecheap had effectively frozen the domain, locking it from being transferred to another registrar.
This makes me sick. What is this world. The hypocrisy of using human rights as a tool and not a principle isn’t even the slightest bit subtle