C (2:29)

and because they were really tan, I immediately stereotyped them as, you know, Hampton spoiled brass moving into the East Village. Turned out they were the Furthest thing from that. Once again, stereotyping is not a good thing. They would come in every Friday night and slowly but surely after about a month, we all, we, you know, we all became friendly.

B (2:51)

Of course they did. Everyone loves Rob. One of them was really into politics. His name is Jeremy, Jeremy Lofredo. He's a reporter.

C (3:02)

Actually, I found out a lot about Jeremy and we would, you know, we would talk politics. Okay. I strike up conversations. That's why I'm good at what I do.

B (3:14)

Then almost a year ago, Jeremy disappeared for a while. Rob didn't know why until one of Jeremy's buddies told Rob that he'd been in Gaza reporting. Rob was like, gaza?

C (3:26)

What the fuck? He got into Gaza when it was no one was getting into Gaza. It reminded me of John Reed in the movie Reds getting into Russia when no one got into Russia. In another time and place. He's definitely got balls.

E (3:43)

On the trailer of this truck is wheat flour for the starving and besieged people of the Gaza Strip.

B (3:48)

Rob sent me the video report that Jeremy made about the trip from March 2024. In it, Jeremy is reporting at a border crossing into southern Gaza, where he is embedded with a group of Israelis who are there to physically block trucks filled with supplies like food, water and gas from getting to the Palestinians in Gaza who need it. The title of the video is in quotes, kill them all. The quote referencing a young man, Hebrew speaking, who appears early in the video. There are two Hebrew speaking men early in the video, but the second one, he is in a white baseball cap, half smiling, smirking, talking into the microphone on his earbuds, he's subtitled. They read, we need to be united and kill all of them, as in calling for the mass murder of Palestinians. That sentiment shows up again three more times. One man saying Israel could erase them in one second. Another saying the Torah says to destroy them. A young woman, maybe in her teens or older, speaking in English, says, kill them. I don't care. It turned my stomach. The video shows families, kids camping out at the border, some in matching T shirts, organized groups, singing, sitting in those low tailgate folding chairs. It's kind of a wholesome, family sinister vibe. A couple of young men drink beer and one flashes a peace sign at the camera. A man gives pastries to IDF soldiers. Jeremy says there are dozens there. Also, according to Jeremy's report, as soon

E (5:35)

as the settlers show up at these crossings, the military meant to secure the area, stands down and guides everyone to the border gates.

B (5:43)

Israeli Defense Forces, the idf, appear to be letting this Happen at the border. The Washington Post reported on a similar scene where the IDF allowed the blocking of aid. One of the groups that day, Zov9, were so good at repeatedly blocking aid to Gaza that the Biden administration ultimately sanctioned them. But at the time Rob had sent me the video, these aid blocking missions were just starting to be known again. This was last spring. I hadn't seen any reporting like it, especially the views of the people in the video, speaking so plainly and hatefully that one guy in the beginning with his creepy smile. Jeremy's video racked up views. Online. Commenters expressed outrage and praised the reporting. I was outraged and amazed. It is a reporting feat being there in person and getting all these people to talk to him. At the end of the video, when the IDF lets some of the people into Gaza, which is not supposed to happen, Jeremy goes with them. Jeremy films one woman in an orange T shirt and big sun hat fantasizing about her husband's plans to build new Israeli cities in Gaza. He loved the Gaza Strip.

E (7:00)

Would you live there?

B (7:01)

Of course.

E (7:02)

By the beach?

B (7:03)

Oh, for sure. My friend Rob watched this and thought, how is this story not breaking news?

C (7:11)

I found it shocking and surprising that, you know, network, and that means all network media, no one picked up on this story. And he somewhat, you know, he moved my position.

B (7:25)

You're saying he, he moved your position with that, with that video he got me to see.

C (7:30)

I, I, you know, I had no idea that the Netanyahu government was allowing settlers to come and blockade going into these poor people in Gaza. No one did. He was the first reporter to cover this story, to my knowledge, and I thought it was a very important story to get out there. And that's when I turned him on to you, because I knew you were working on this new podcast, so I thought you two should be hooked up.

B (7:57)

The place where Jeremy works, it's controversial, to say the least. It's called the Gray Zone. Their tagline is independent news and investigative journalism on Empire. Their coverage is strident and so hypercritical of US Foreign policy that it ends up being pretty sympathetic to America's adversaries like Russia, Syria, China, Iran. In fact, the Gray Zone's founder, a journalist named Max Blumenthal, is constantly trying to punch away implications that the Gray Zone is paid for by Russia or Iran. He says it's funded by readers. Though Max has been a frequent guest on Russian and Iranian state tv, and others at the Gray Zone have worked for those places. There's this place called News Guard. It grades the dependability of various news sources out of 100, it gives the gray zone 49.5 and a proceed with caution warning saying that the gray zone has sometimes advanced untrue conspiracies about Western interference in global politics and used misleading headlines. Just to give you a flavor of the gray zone and its founder. When NewsGuard was raiding the site, Max Blumenthal responded to them, quote, do you seriously expect us to grovel for approval from the same tentacle of the national security state and financial oligarchy that has rated CNN as a highly credible news source? I asked Rob about the gray zone. Do you know who he works for?

C (9:29)

I've done a little digging. I know what the gray zone is. I know it's controversial. The way the mainstream media makes it sound is completely funded by Iran and Russia. I brought that up to him.

B (9:44)

Rob was not so concerned, I think because the gray zone is saying it can do important work that traditional big name media can't do because it's too intertwined with corporate and government interests. And then the gray zone is delivering on that promise with guerrilla style reporting. I saw the appeal of that and was interested in Jeremy, who whatever the gray zone was about was still doing a really hard thing. Going to a war zone, getting not one, but many tricky interviews and exposing corruption at the Gaza border. I brought Jeremy's story up at a question everything story meeting, wondering essentially how should we think about that daring story Jeremy did in light of where he works. I was having one of those moments. Maybe you can relate. You find some story online and it shocks you or makes you angry and then you wonder about it, who made it? Can you trust it in this case? Because my friend knew the reporter who made the video. I had a chance to really figure that out firsthand to see if this one story was solid. I scheduled an interview with Jeremy back in June about that story of his, the aid blocking story. But he had to cancel. I had to reschedule and then I stopped hearing from him until this past October when I learned that Jeremy had gone back to Israel to do more reporting and while he was there got arrested and hadn't been let go. Jeremy Lofredo holds a very particular title. He's the only American journalist to ever be formally arrested by Israel. And yet what happened to him just three months ago has barely caught the attention of major American news. Maybe you haven't even heard about this. When my friend Rob heard about it, he was furious.

C (11:29)

This is an American journalist to an I'm air quoting this, which you can't see an ally that we are sending billions of dollars to as they commit atrocities to the poor Gazan people. And all he's doing is trying to find out what's going on so he can report on it. I was appalled.

B (11:51)

That's the story we have today. The story of a 20 something reporter blindly feeling his way through truly dicey, uncharted territory with so many twists and turns that this is a two part series. Two episodes this week and then our next episode too. Today on Question everything from KCRW and placement theory. What happened to my friend's friend Jeremy Lofredo, who was arrested in Israel for being a reporter? At least that's what he thought at the time. Though to be honest, it's not exactly all that straightforward. And by the end of this, hopefully we'll see. I'm still figuring it out. I'll get an answer to my question of whether I should trust Jeremy and the gray zones reporting. Stick around.

D (12:38)

There's a lot going on right now. Mounting economic inequality, threats to democracy, environmental disaster, the sour stench of chaos in the air. I'm Brooke Gladstone, host of WNYC's on the Media. Want to understand the reasons and the meanings of the narratives that led us here and maybe how to head them off at the pass that's on the media's specialty. Take a listen wherever you get your podcasts.

B (13:11)

The day he got detained, Jeremy Lofredo was in a car in the west bank on his way to the city of Nablus. This was a little over three months ago in October. It was a scorching hot day and Jeremy was with four other people. A human rights activist, a human rights activist, reporter, a photographer, and another reporter who was Palestinian and was driving the car. It might help to picture the west bank like this. There's a big area, it's called Area C and that's under Israel's control. Then there are like islands within Area C. One of them, Area B, is jointly controlled by Israel and the Palestinian Authority. And the other, Area A, where Nablus is, that's solely controlled by the Palestinians. Israeli citizens aren't even allowed to go to Area A, though Israeli security forces regularly conduct raids there, which is part of why Jeremy wants to go there, to see what resistance to Israel looks like on the ground in the West Bank.

E (14:16)

I was watching videos online, like every day all the time of what a raid in the northern west bank looks like right now. What type of weapons are they using? How much movement can people exercise while the raid is happening? How violent do the Resistance fighters the Palestinians get when their village has the army in it. You know, it's just like I'm seeing all these videos. This is probably the first time that, you know this era where you can watch a raid from someone trapped in a house from their cell phone video, and they can upload it to the Internet and I can watch what it's like. So I know what it's going to be like there. And I'm definitely really nervous. But I'm with people in the car with me that have been traveling in and out of these villages for a few years. So I do feel more comfortable being with them and being with the group than just being by myself.

B (15:08)

The person driving, Hussein Ahreini, had just turned 30. Everyone else is in their 20s. Jeremy's 28. He was riding in the front passenger seat. In the backseat was the human rights activist Mayor Gorodskoy. There's another woman, an Israeli photographer named Zofia who asked me not to use her last name, and a Russian Israeli who calls himself an activist and reporter, Andre. He goes by Andre X on Twitter. Mayer and Andre both both work for many different human rights advocacy organizations in the West Bank. Hussein's Palestinian. He lives in Natwani, a small village in the southern west bank, so he's allowed to move through the checkpoints into Palestinian controlled territory. And Jeremy's an American citizen, so he's allowed to go there too. Jeremy believed the others in the backseat were playing a slightly higher stakes game than he and Hussein were because they

E (16:01)

are Israeli and they're not technically allowed into Nablus.

B (16:08)

They'd been driving for four hours on a main highway that was gridlocked with traffic. So they turned off onto the crappier two lane back roads. So far, Hussein, the one driving the car, had been asked to show his ID at every checkpoint. They pulled into the city of Burin about 20 minutes from Nablus. When they arrived at what Jeremy thinks is the last checkpoint of the trip on the border of Area B and Area C.

E (16:34)

Apparently our Palestinian driver drove a few feet further than the army soldiers told him to drive when they told him to slow down. And for that reason, they told us to pull off to the side and hand over our identification. And the Israeli soldier asks for all of our IDs.

B (16:52)

How are you feeling at that moment?

E (16:54)

I'm thinking I am way better off than everyone else in this car. Like, I really am thinking, like, I'm nervous for them. But I know I'm American and I know I'm allowed to go where I'm going. So worst case scenario, he tells us to turn around because these people are Israeli and he found out somehow. Or they get in trouble. And I'm fine.

B (17:16)

The soldiers are in no hurry. Maybe an hour or so goes by.

E (17:22)

We're eating cucumbers. We got out of the car a few times. There was fig trees next to us. We grabbed figs and went back in the car. We're talking.

B (17:31)

What were you talking about?

E (17:33)

They are all pretty nervous because they are actively about to break the law. So they're nervous. They're talking about, maybe we should just go back. No. But we can't, because they already have our passports. Okay, what should I say if he asked me if I'm Israeli? Should I lie? Should I just say I'm Israeli? So they're having these conversations over and over. People are deleting things off their phones, deleting pictures, deleting apps off their cell phones, hiding their phones and taking out. Maybe they have a second phone. They say that that's their primary phone. The Palestinian driver, he was deleting things off his phone. I'm kind of calm. I am looking behind me and wondering what's taking so long.

B (18:15)

I should mention I've spoken to everyone in the car that day for this story, and some remember the order of events differently. But the details here reflect the summation of what I learned. An Israeli soldier with an assault rifle came over to their car and asked for their phones. Andre started recording the soldier on his phone. Jeremy describes him, Andre, as someone who doesn't mind yelling at a soldier.

E (18:40)

Andre says, I'm not going to give you my phone. You cannot take my phone. And the guy says, no, give me your phone right now. Get out of the car. The soldier puts his hand in the door, opens the door, grabs Andre, grabs Andre out of the car by, like, his head and neck, puts him on the ground, points his gun, his M16 or AR15, I don't know what it was. A long gun, like a rifle in Andre's face. Keeps it there for, like, maybe five seconds. Everyone's silent. It is. It's really scary. And then he takes it away. He hits Andre once in the face with, like, an open hand and then takes his phone. And now he says, now, everyone get out of the car and give me your phones. I said, I'm an American. I don't understand. And he ended his sentence by saying, but you still have to give me your cell phone. He told us all to get out of the car and sit on the dirt Outside of the car, I'm like, crisscross applesauce. We're all a few feet away from each other, sitting in dirt about 30ft away from this checkpoint. And they went across the street. They made phone calls to what presumably was their superiors. And one by one, they're asking us to come unlock our phones, and we all said no. Andre asked me if I was okay. I said yes. And we get yelled at by three different soldiers. Say to stop talking. And, like, I would just, like, look at the sun, or, like, I would look at the soldiers, or I would look at the ground. No matter where I looked, Like, I'd have a soldier pointing at me, saying, like, what? Do you have a problem? And I was like, I don't know. How do I act? Like I have less of a problem? Like, where do I look? The Palestinian driver next to me, I don't know exactly what's happening with him, but, like, he needed water or something, and he was, like, getting very tired, weak. And they were making fun of him, saying that vitamin D is good for you. Vitamin D is good for you.

B (20:40)

Jeremy says. One of the soldiers called Jeremy by his last name, Mr. Lofredo. Come here, he says. Jeremy asks, what's happening.

E (20:49)

They took out maybe 20 or 30ft of cloth, and they wrapped it tightly around my head, my eyes, my ears, and part of my nose as a blindfold. They shackled my legs, and they put my hands behind my back and zip tied my hands. And I said, why are you doing this? And they said, because. Intelligence.

B (21:13)

Jeremy doesn't know what that means. Intelligence. The others are being handcuffed and blindfolded, too. One of them, Sophia, was allowed to not have her face covered. Also, this is one of the spots where the people in the car remember the timing differently. Whether they got shackled this early in the ordeal or later. They were taken to a military building where they sat in a room together, and then the two women were put in a car and driven off. Jeremy and Andre got put in a different vehicle.

E (21:44)

We're laying down in the back of a military truck. There are soldiers in the car saying, do you love Israel? Do you love Israel? Just taunting us. I've seen the army go into Palestinian villages, and when they arrest someone, they arrest them. Like, they blindfold them with a white thing. They shackle them, and they handcuff them. I've seen that done before. Never to an American, never to anyone who's not Palestinian.

B (22:14)

Jeremy can't quite get a handle on what's happening. Journalists are supposed to be treated as civilians during wartime, supposed to be protected. That's in the Geneva Conventions that Israel, which touts itself as the only democracy in the Middle east, signed on to. And yet Israeli forces have been arresting Palestinian reporters in record numbers. As of this week, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Israel had arrested 72 Palestinian journalists and media workers. The number of Palestinian journalists and media workers who have lost their lives covering this war makes it one of the worst conflicts for journalists. 157 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed in the conflict. Again, that's from the Committee to Protect Journalists, which found that 11 journalists were directly targeted by Israeli forces. It classifies those as murders. And Al Jazeera's numbers are more damning, citing 222 Palestinian journalists and media workers killed as of December 26th in Gaza alone. And in 2022, Israeli forces killed a Palestinian American reporter for Al Jazeera, Shireen Abu Akleh. She was covering a raid in the Jenin refugee camp, a place where Jeremy's hoping to go. An Israeli soldier shot her in the head while she was wearing a blue press vest. Jeremy is not totally naive about the dangers, but he also knows the US Is Israel's ally. So why him? What's going on here? Blindfolded in the back of the Humvee, Jeremy wondered if they were being driven in circles as a scare tactic. Eventually, they stopped and pulled him and Andre out of the vehicle.

E (24:00)

They unhandcuffed me and told me that I can take off my blindfold. I was in a parking lot on top of a mountain. I don't know where I was exactly, but all I could see was a parking lot and that everything else was lower than me.

B (24:16)

So Jeremy didn't know where he was and didn't know what happened to Sofia, Mayor, or Hussein. Before leaving on this trip, he'd been checking in regularly with his dad in New Jersey and his girlfriend in New York, telling them that he was fine, downplaying his nervousness about the reporting he was doing. How long would it be before they started to worry because he hadn't touched base? How long would it take his editor back in New York to notice that he dropped out of contact? Did the soldiers believe he was a journalist? Had they seen his work? And if they had, would that help him or hurt him? When he was 19, Jeremy went to Manhattan College in Riverdale in the Bronx, where he studied history before switching to journalism and international relations. In college, he worked at a local paper called the Riverdale Press. Straight out of college, he landed his first full time job.

E (25:16)

I worked for. This is controversial here and I understand how people might look down on it, but I worked for Russia today.

B (25:25)

Like rt, RT is Russia's state run media channel and textbook propaganda. A megaphone funded by the Russian government, it blurs real reporting with conspiracies like Obama birtherism theories or stories managing to blame Ukraine for making Russia invade it. The original RT was English speaking only. So deliberately in search of an English speaking audience, it has since expanded to 10 other languages. Where Jeremy worked, RT America was a branch of RT proper. During a window of time when Russian funded media operated openly as Russian funded media in an office in D.C. for a stint. They even acquired Capitol Hill press credentials. But RT America was still RT for us by Russia. Some of Jeremy's former professors were not thrilled about him working for rt. They thought it wasn't a great place to start off a career in journalism. But Jeremy still thought he could do impactful work producing a TV show covering

E (26:32)

international relations and US domestic policy. And it was nice because as a young person I was able to truly produce a new show at 21 years old. I picked the topics, I found the guests, I booked the guests, the professors, the UN rapporteurs, and it was lots of fun. And of course it's funded by Russia, but at the same time it's American journalists, it's an American audience and of course they want to. Russia wants to categorize and show how corrupt US systems of power are and how bad our military is. Of course they want to use that for propaganda and I get that. But at the same time a lot of that is true. There's a lot of corruption here. Our military is not always great. And so if we are Americans telling Americans this, I didn't see the harm. I understand my paychecks coming from the Russian state and like that's not, of course that's not great, but like I, it's, you know, becoming from, you know, Murdoch or coming from Fox News and you know, to each their own.

B (27:44)

RT America shut down in 2022, right after Russia invaded Ukraine. This was after it had been labeled a foreign agent by the DOJ and had lost its Capitol Hill press credentials. Jeremy was gone by then, but he had made some industry connections at rt. And it was at RT where he met his future editor and Grey Zone founder, Max Blumenthal. Max, who at one point had written for more traditional places like the Nation and the New York Times, had been a guest on the RT America show Jeremy worked on. So years later, when Jeremy found himself out of a job with RT on his resume and looking for freelance work, he got a job at Max's online news site, the Gray Zone. Before Jeremy, back in 2014, Max had gone to Gaza and reported on the conflict. This reporting is all very critical of Israel. Jeremy is Jewish and so is Max. In one of Max's books, Jeremy loved about on the ground reporting in Gaza. When October 7th happened in 2023, 27 year old Jeremy thought truly he would love to go to Israel, try to do something similar to what Max might have done, report the conflict there in person to try to tell a story that shows Israel not as a victim, but as a clear oppressor, a state committing war crimes that the US is aiding. With Max as his editor back in New York, Jeremy had never reported in a conflict zone before, had no training, had never been to Israel. Max told him about a few fixers in the west bank and names of hotels, but that was about it. But he was eager. And so barely a week after the October 7th attacks, Jeremy got on a plane to Tel Aviv, going to Israel. How nervous were you?

E (29:35)

I wasn't that nervous. It sounds crazy, I don't even, I can't explain, but there are dozens of reporters in every war zone and every conflict zone you can think of. And it was easy for me to justify this because it was like, I'm just another one. If they're all fine, I'll be fine. I wasn't wrestling it. If anything, I was really excited.

B (29:59)

Say more about that. Excited.

E (30:01)

By going there, I automatically, I feel like I was doing something more important than I was doing before. So I was happy.

B (30:12)

I've heard this before from war reporters. You're a part of this small community of people seeing what's really happening up close. It's thrilling. The adrenaline is addictive and obviously dangerous, but it's exponentially more dangerous for people who aren't experienced. And Jeremy definitely wasn't experienced. Jeremy says that on his first night in Tel Aviv, I was on the

E (30:34)

phone with my father and talking to my dad on the phone, walking down the street and like a siren starts happening. And he says, what's that? And I said, I don't know, I'm gonna mute you. I thought like a fire truck was coming and I said, trucks? I'm gonna call you back. I hung up on him and it was a rocket siren. And I looked and I saw people running and like I'm looking around, everyone's going to the hotel lobby that I'm staying at and like in this hotel. It's just journalists at this point and a few displaced families from southern Israel. And we all go into a bomb shelter. And so it was a lot to handle. I've been there for maybe four hours.

B (31:14)

He's stressed out.

E (31:15)

Am I okay? Should I stay in this bomb shelter? Should I go across the street? Can I go back outside? And I text my editor, Max Blumenthal. I say, I'm in a bomb shelter. There's rockets. He says. He says, interview people. And I'm thinking, I forgot. Like, I'm at work. Max is saying, like, you're fine. There's gonna be bombs in Tel Aviv. You should report on it and start interviewing people you know. He's lived in Gaza for many years during wartime. And so I. I'm, like, thinking, okay, I think I'm overreacting, and I need to, like, get to work.

B (31:53)

That's the dynamic and workflow between Jeremy and Max. Jeremy would have story ideas. Max would give guidance. Then Jeremy would wrangle together a driver here, a translator there, and report. Over the course of the year, Jeremy made six stories from Israel and the West Bank. There's the one about Israeli dissidents and the danger they're in for speaking out against the war. A story titled Armenian Christians Under Siege by Israel about the small Armenian community in Jerusalem's Old City who were facing displacement. And that story, my friend Rob sent me, that went more viral than the others, about that group of Israelis blocking aid trucks on the Gaza border. And then a few days before he was detained, Jeremy filed a quick story about the Iranian missile attacks on October 1, 2024. He loaded that story on gray zone on October 5, 2024. Three days later, on his way to Nablus, he got arrested. The story Jeremy was on his way to Nablus to report was by far his most dangerous. He made a plan.

E (33:02)

I wanted to interview the resistance fighters from Jeanine Brigade. I wanted to interview the Palestinian fighters. My phone was filled with conversations with people who I did not know who were supposedly fixers in Jenin, supposedly fixers in Nablus. And I'm asking them, how can I meet these fighters? They're very secretive, but, like, people have. Journalists have spoken to them, and it's valid journalist inquiry to, like, ask these people questions. And I would love to do that. You know? The Jenin Brigade is an organized fighting group in Jenin that protects Jenin and the Jenin refugee camp from the Israeli military.

B (33:37)

The Jenin refugee camp was where Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot and killed by the IDF in May 2022.

E (33:47)

So if the Israeli military wants to come in and shut off the water and tear up all the roads, then the Jenin brigade might shoot at them and then there will be a firefight. And so like their, their whole goal is to try to protect the village and the refugee camp from the Israeli military. And that's what all these sort of, they call themselves resistance groups, but like, you know, Israel would say that they're terrorists.

B (34:10)

You're really describing like a year long trajectory going from like, oh, I don't really know what I'll go see or what I'll go get. And I just wonder if it registered for you that you're becoming a different kind of reporter, that your tolerance for risk taking had gone up.

E (34:31)

Yeah, I actually have not thought about that until you just said that just now. Yeah, no, you're entirely right. Just like a month before I was there, there was a raid in Jenin, which is when all the entrances to the Jenin refugee camp are closed. Buildings are blown up, buildings are raided, the water shut off. There's firefighting between Palestinian fighters and IDF soldiers. And I'm thinking like, the chances are really good that I'm going to be around like live gunfire for the first time ever.

B (35:08)

From the mountaintop parking lot. Hours after he'd been taken into custody, on his way to do that dangerous reporting in the West Bank, Jeremy still didn't know what he was being accused of or what had happened to Sophia and Mayer, the two women reporters they were with.

E (35:24)

Andre and I are put in a holding cell. This is not a jail. This is like a police military compound in the West Bank. And all of the police officers and intelligence officers and soldiers are wearing plain clothes. Everybody's just in jeans and a T shirt. You're in a room, you know, we're in a room, but like, it has like a, like a jail gate and everything on it.

B (35:42)

Oh, bars, yes. Okay. Windows.

E (35:45)

No windows.

B (35:47)

The soldiers asked Andre and Jeremy to hand over anything extra. Standard issue contraband stuff. A necklace, a hat, shoelaces, belt. After a while, some soldiers open the gate and walk them down a hallway when Jeremy says they were suddenly reconnected with the others from their group, the

E (36:06)

two dual citizens from Israel. They're two girls, they're women.

B (36:09)

Please picture two women.

E (36:11)

They're walking down the hall with the soldiers and like, they seem to be like they're not having the same type of time that we are having. Maybe because it's two Israeli girls.

B (36:21)

They're having a better time or what?

E (36:22)

Yeah, yeah. No, they're having a better time. They don't have the blindfolds on, and they don't have a look of fear in their face. So I think they, at that point, had figured out that we're gonna get let go very soon.

B (36:32)

They walk to the second floor of the police station, and there in the

E (36:36)

hallway, they've put a big sign or a flag against the wall, and it says, together we will win, which is like the nationalistic war slogan. Right now in Israel, there's five police officers. They told us to stand in front of, like, a militaristic, nationalistic war slogan. I'm shackled and handcuffed in front of a big, you know, wartime slogan flag. And they take out their phones, and they're taking photos with their cell phones and laughing, telling us to smile, telling us to stop smiling, yelling at us in Hebrew, like, I don't understand them.

A (37:09)

Just.

E (37:09)

Just to. Just for fun.

B (37:11)

This is like a trophy photo.

E (37:13)

Yes, that's exactly what I mean. It felt like a trophy photo. And I have all these soldiers and police officers taking pictures on their phones and laughing. It's getting later, which is scary. It doesn't seem like there's protocol. Like, there's no one. No one is keeping checks and balances on anyone.

B (37:28)

Was anyone in charge? Like, did you have a sense just of the soldiers who were there? Oh, this guy. He's in charge.

E (37:37)

There was one woman who was, like, maybe 45 years old that I only saw for a few seconds that night that would come out of an office and ask them a question in Hebrew, and they would ask me in English, and I would tell them the answer. She said, who's the American? I said, me, kind of like, you know, so naive to think, like, she's asking for who the American is because she wants to let the American go. I was like, oh, it's me. It's me. She said, okay. And then she walked away.

B (38:05)

This whole time, midday to late at night, Jeremy and Andre told me they had not been offered food or water, not even a phone call. Until finally a police officer comes and tells Andre, there's a lawyer on the line for you. Andre steps out of the cell. He's gone a little while, and he comes back.

E (38:24)

He's gone for maybe 30 minutes. And then I see the two girls, the Israeli girls, walking by my holding cell. And, like, they have a guilty look on their face. They feel bad. Their heads are down from my cell. I said, where are you guys going? What's happening? And one of them looked up at me for a second, like she did not make eye contact, and said, like, they're letting us go. It was the guiltiest they're letting us go ever.

B (38:49)

Within the next hour or so, Andre was let go, too.

E (38:53)

And that's when I got scared and my heart dropped.

B (38:57)

Andre left, and with him, any possible chance for Jeremy to understand what the soldiers or anyone around him was saying in Hebrew. Jeremy sat there quietly, listening to occasional chatter in a language he doesn't know. And then Jeremy says, something surreal happened.

E (39:18)

I'm Jeremy Lofredo for the Gray zone in Israel, where last night Iran fired over 200 ballistic missiles. I hear from the office, the police office that's next to my prison cell, my own voice. I hear them listening to my video report on the Iranian missile attack.

B (39:34)

That story that he quickly published right before heading to the West Bank.

E (39:39)

I hear them listening to it on their computer speakers. And that's when it finally clicks for me that this is not about trying to get into Nablus. This is not about being with Israelis who are not allowed in this part of the West Bank. This is about my journalism.

B (39:56)

What Jeremy reported that so pissed off the Israeli military. That's after the break.

D (40:08)

There's a lot going on right now. Mounting economic inequality, threats to democracy, environmental disaster, the sour stench of chaos and in the air. I'm Brooke Gladstone, host of WNYC's on the Media. Want to understand the reasons and the meanings of the narratives that led us here and maybe how to head them off at the pass? That's on the media's specialty. Take a listen wherever you get your podcasts.

B (40:39)

The story that got Jeremy arrested, the one he says he heard wafting through the bars of his holding cell at the police station, was the story he'd filed just a few days before his arrest about rocket attacks from Iran. Jeremy was at a cafe in Jerusalem when sirens went off. People started to panic. And when you look up, what do you see?

E (41:00)

They look like. Like shooting stars passing by. They're far enough into the sky where it looks like a plane almost.

B (41:08)

Have you ever seen anything like that with your own eyes?

E (41:11)

No,

B (41:13)

I was.

E (41:14)

No, I was really nervous.

B (41:17)

Iran's missiles were fired at several targets, including an air force base. And at intelligence headquarters, the Mossad in Tel Aviv, Israel, said it shot down most of them.

E (41:30)

I remember texting my editor saying, like, is this the first time that Iran had sent missiles to Israel since the start of the war? Like, how unprecedented is this? Like, I Don't know. I'm not sure I know.

B (41:40)

What did Max say?

E (41:41)

He said this is the second time they did this. One other time, when Israel bombed an Iranian type of diplomatic mission embassy in Syria. But this was definitely the biggest quantity of missiles ever sent by Iran, at least since October 7th.

B (41:58)

Jeremy had been getting ready to go to Nablus. But given the missile attacks, Max was thinking about a new assignment, a detour. By the next day, he started texting.

E (42:08)

Jeremy reports, specifically some videos that people have gathered. Just what is happening in different parts of the country, the aftermath of the missile attacks. Says it is a really newsworthy story, like these rockets. I know that's not your plan. I know that we really have no interest in reporting on that. But it's newsworthy, and you're there.

B (42:27)

As Mack said it, if an Iranian missile landed in Tel Aviv, that's an important story. Not just because Tel Aviv is a big, dense, cosmopolitan city, but because there were some photos and videos already out saying that there was a crater very close to Mossad headquarters.

E (42:45)

There was a PBS NewsHour report of a journalist. His name's Nick Shiffrin. He posted on his Twitter account a video of him and he standing in front of a crater in Tel Aviv the night of that night. This is the impact site for one of those Iranian ballistic missiles. He shows the camera the crater, and then he points to a building behind him and says, that white building back there, about 1,500ft behind me, is the headquarters of the spy agency, the Mossad. So he says where the crater is, he shows it, and he says how far it was from the Mossad headquarters. So that's the only thing that I saw about there being any craters in Tel Aviv, about them being near the intelligence agency headquarters. So Max sent this video to me. He said, apparently there's craters in Tel Aviv, and you can't find anything anywhere except for this1 PBS NewsHour video. In terms of the damage caused to

B (43:41)

Tel Aviv, Jeremy and Max figured there had to be more out there, more evidence of the damage done. And what if the gray zone could break that news, try to show the extent to which Israel was much more damaged by Iran, possibly than anyone was saying. To them, it seemed like the kind of thing the government would be covering up. If they could see the destruction up close, maybe they could report some new details that other outlets might be less likely to publish because they are embarrassing to Israel. So Jeremy made his way to the spot where the reporter, Nick shiffrin from PBS NewsHour Broadcast in Tel Aviv.

E (44:19)

He says he was 2,000ft from the Mossad headquarters. He said that in the.

C (44:22)

The video.

E (44:23)

So I finding the neighborhood that the Mossad headquarters is in. I think we're on the right street. It seems like we're near this building that was. In one of the videos that you could see, There was a 2013 or 2013 sign on the building. And now I'm driving, and I'm seeing that building out of my window.

B (44:41)

Oh, you just recognize it?

E (44:42)

Yeah, I'm looking for it. Tel Aviv is similar to Los Angeles or New York City, where there's giant buildings of apartments or offices everywhere, public transportation, cars everywhere, highways. And so that's why seeing a crater in Tel Aviv was so incredibly interesting in Tel Aviv, in the Israeli media, like, you could. You're told that a target that they missed was in Tel Aviv, but, like, that's not really. The story is that there's a crater in Tel Aviv. I get to the place where I think the crater is, and I look around, and I don't see anything out of the ordinary. And then I see a car that is totally demolished with dirt caked in to the entire vehicle. I'm thinking, that's not a car crash. There was four or five entirely total vehicles with dirt and giant concrete pieces the size of my torso scattered around everywhere. All the vehicles are mangled. This is the day after the missile attacks. It's still. They haven't cleaned anything up. I'm looking around. There's dirt everywhere. There's cars that look like they just came from, you know, the front lines of a war right here. I'm looking around, I'm seeing all this dirt, and I think, oh, wait, this is where Nick Shifrin was standing from PBS NewsHour. I look behind me, everything's the same as the video, except for one thing.

B (46:04)

The crater is no longer a crater. It's more of a mound of packed dirt. Jeremy thinks Mossad must have tried to hide the hole where the crater was.

E (46:13)

That's where this big pile of dirt is. They just filled in the crater with dirt. And I'm also thinking, why are there no other journalists here? This is a giant story.

B (46:24)

What Jeremy is seeing, he feels like it confirms the idea that something is being covered up, that there's something big here that the Israeli government does not want anyone to see.

E (46:34)

This is the day after, and it's just eerie, kind of. It's silent. I'm the only one there. Every time a car, like I hear a car, I think it's the police. I don't know why I'm the only one there. And I'm Also, they say 2,000ft from the Mossad headquarters, but it was just a street that I drove to with my taxi driver, like an Uber driver could take me there. It was totally open to go to. The street was not closed off. There was no signs, no anything. A missile came from Iran, their biggest geopolitical enemy, and landed in their biggest and most populated city. And there's no journals here. And there's still all the destruction around. Destroyed cars everywhere, debris everywhere. Nothing has had been swept up even yet. But the street is open, it's just empty. So I started to be worried. I'm thinking the the police are going to come yell at me, something's about to happen. It was like an interesting energy in this place because it's just a giant story to be the only one there was strange. I got back and I told Max that I had done this and this and this and got videos of this, this and this. And he said, cool, when can we have it out by? I said, oh, you're expecting me to? Okay. So I said, okay, I'll edit it now, I'll put it together, I'll be done in a day or two and then I will finally get to go do what I've been trying to report on, which is violence in the West Bank. So I go to my hotel and I put it together. The scene unfolded. Destroyed vehicles, torn up asphalt and a massive crater roughly 30ft wide, recently filled in with dirt.

B (48:10)

It's night. The camera pans from an empty city street lit up with streetlights to a white, maybe 10 story building much wider than it is tall. That's the Mossad headquarters.

E (48:22)

The missile had hit less than 1,000ft from Mossad headquarters.

B (48:26)

In a graphic, an overhead Google map image with two big red circles shows where the crater is. A Mossad headquarters with coordinates.

E (48:35)

Given the proximity to what is considered one of the world's most advanced intelligence agencies, it seemed clear that Israel was taking extra precautions to conceal the exact impact location for the gray zone in Israel.

B (48:45)

Jeremy Lofredo One thing to be aware of. In order to report in Israel, reporters typically get something called a gpo, a government press office card. They are recommended, not required. Jeremy doesn't have that. He told me he meant to apply for one, but that after October 7th he had the impression that it was harder than ever to get one, so he skipped it. Plus he thought if he was formally denied, it would raise a red flag or carry Some kind of penalty. Then he got used to not having one and never applied. The Government Press Office application requires you to say who you work for, show contracts with your employer, and is necessary to get a work visa.

E (49:30)

And so if you have a government Press office card, you need to go through this. Israeli military sensor.

B (49:35)

The Israeli Military center is pretty much what it sounds like. It's a department of the IDF that requires journalists to subject their reporting to military approval before publishing. The idea is that during wartime, there's sensitive information regarding national security that could harm the country. The IDF has published a list of topics that are off limits to reporters. The list includes things like weapons used by the IDF and stories about people held hostage by Hamas and the exact location of missile strikes and the extent of damage caused.

E (50:10)

Right here are the censored coordinates, which

B (50:13)

Jeremy definitely did in his missile strike video. In fact, he makes a point of doing exactly what the sensors say are off limits.

E (50:22)

Finding the exact impact site was difficult. Israel's military sensor had barred the media from reporting the locations of the missile strikes.

B (50:30)

So, yeah, Jeremy was aware of the censors.

E (50:34)

Yeah, it truly was. But when I made this report of trying to document where missiles had fallen, I saw that PBS NewsHour and Yanet and all these big mainstream media organizations operating inside of Israel were reporting exactly what I was reporting.

B (50:51)

Now, you might notice a discrepancy here. In the report he published, Jeremy is suggesting that no one has reported on this because of the censors.

E (51:00)

Israel's military censor had barred the media from reporting the locations of the missile

B (51:04)

strikes, and that he and the Gray Zone are bringing you the real, uncensored truth, which may be good for the Gray Zone's branding, but it's not entirely the case, because here he's saying he was aware not just of that PBS NewsHour report, but of other outlets in Israel reporting the story, too, which, if they were reporting, presumably they'd gotten approval from the censor. So you were like, I'm going to go out and do the kind of reporting that I do, and I feel like it's not that risky, basically, because I'm seeing it reported in other international sites.

E (51:37)

Exactly, yes.

B (51:40)

Had you run your other reporting through the military censors?

E (51:43)

I've never gone through the military censor. This is the first time I've ever published something in Israel while I was still in Israel. I always go there and I document things on my camera, and I never publish anything while I'm there. And I come back to New York, and that's when I put everything together. So this was the first time that I was reporting in Israel and putting it out in real time. I was moving fast and willing to. I didn't take seriously the threat of the state. I could never picture them actually doing anything to me for what I thought. So I put out the video and I even, like. I thought to myself, how can I make this better than the video reports I had already seen on this? I said, well, I could maybe overlay where I was standing with Google Maps and show the viewer or the reader exactly where I was. And it is. It's public information. The Mossad building. You can find it on Google Maps. How about we visualize that? How about I put a circle where the missile landed on top of Google Maps so people can really see where it landed. So I was trying to. I was pushing the envelope. I just was trying to make my video better.

B (52:56)

But now sitting in his cell, it seemed bad.

E (53:00)

Well, listening to that was scary. Before, I didn't have to defend anything. I wasn't doing anything wrong. But, like, now, this video, they're going to. I don't know what they're going to say. They're going to say something about it was not allowed to be said, and I'm going to have to defend it. I yell at myself, like, excuse me. And, like, someone finally comes and I say, why am I still here? And they say, oh, like, we have to ask. And then finally, the lady appears. I say, what's happening? Why am I still here? What's going on? She says, there's a different protocol for you because, like, you're a journalist. I said, they were all journalists as well. I don't understand. She said, it's a different protocol. You will have your interrogation or you'll talk to your lawyer very soon. So I'm sitting in this holding cell. Maybe now it's midnight, and an officer comes down and says, your lawyer's on the phone. I said, okay. So I went to this office and I answered the phone.

B (53:53)

Jeremy says he has no idea who this lawyer who called him is. He doesn't even know her name. Which means we weren't able to confirm it beyond Jeremy's account. We have only his account for this whole stretch of the story where he's being held alone. The police didn't respond to our requests.

E (54:10)

And the lawyer says, Mr. Lofredo, I want you to be very honest with me. I want you to be very clear. I said, excuse me. They said, what did you do?

B (54:23)

Israeli authorities believe Jeremy was possibly giving information to the enemy during wartime. Jeremy tried to explain it could be this video.

E (54:32)

She says, what do you mean, this video?

B (54:34)

Jeremy says he's in the middle of trying to explain more about the video to his lawyer when the door behind him opens and a soldier comes in, walks over to the desk phone Jeremy's

E (54:45)

on, and he ends up hitting the thing that makes the phone hang up. So he hangs up the phone.

B (54:54)

What he managed to gather from that call, Jeremy wasn't suspected of being a journalist who was too flagrant with the military censors. Jeremy was suspected of espionage and that

E (55:06)

the consequences are very grave, very serious.

B (55:09)

Did they say what the consequences were?

E (55:12)

Not at that moment, no.

B (55:13)

In the days to come, Jeremy would learn if convicted of aiding an enemy during wartime, the sentence could be life in prison or the death penalty. We reached out to Israeli Defense Forces, and in a statement, they said they did not use verbal or physical violence against Jeremy or the others he was with, except to use, quote, reasonable force to remove Andre from the vehicle when they say he refused to exit to let them search. They said part of the reason they detained Jeremy and the people he was traveling with was because the five of them said they were journalists, but none of them presented a government press office card. I'm Robin Simeon. On our next episode, we'll have the second part of our story about Jeremy Lofredo and learn more about why Israel chose to arrest him. Sign up for our substack@questioneverything.substack.com this episode was produced by Zach St. Louis and was edited by Joel Lovell. Our show is made by host Brian Reed, producer Sophie Casis and associate producer Emily Moltaire. Jonathan Goldstein, Neil Drumming and Jen Kinney are contributing editors. Fact checking by Annika Robbins and Maggie Duffy. Sound design by Brendan Baker. Music by Matt McGinley. Brian and I are the executive producers of Question Everything Today. Our team includes managing editor Kevin Sullivan, associate producer Kevin Shepard, and fact checker Marisa Robertson, texter. Our partners at KCRW include Arnie Seiple, Gina Delvak, Tejal Ajamera and Jennifer Farrow. Special thanks to Evia Tar Rubin, Yael, Evan Orr, Dan Efron, Miki Meek and Laura Starcheski. Thanks for listening.

D (57:15)

There's a lot going on right now. Mounting economic inequality, threats to democracy, environmental disaster, the sour stench of chaos in the air. I'm Brooke Gladstone, host of WNYC's on the Media. Want to understand the reasons and the meanings of the narratives that led us here and maybe how to head them off at the pass. That's on the media's specialty. Take a listen wherever you get your podcasts.