American reporter says Israel treated him as enemy in WB
American journalist Jeremy Loffredo says Israeli authorities detained him in the West Bank, holding him in solitary confinement and treating him as an enemy rather than a member of the press.
Loffredo, an investigative reporter for the Grayzone, discussed his experience in an interview with Press TV, marking his first conversation with Iranian media after his release.
Loffredo was arbitrarily detained days after his groundbreaking video that exposed extensive damage to Israeli military bases near Tel Aviv, hit by Iranian ballistic missiles.
After spending days in solitary confinement, he was informally deported to the US.
Loffredo told the Press TV website that the charges against him included “providing information to the enemy during wartime,” which, if convicted, carries “a minimum 25-year prison sentence and a maximum death sentence.”
These unprecedented charges against an American journalist sparked widespread outcry.
“In police custody, I was treated not as a journalist, but as an enemy of the state—a distinction that, for Israel, seemed irrelevant. I was held in solitary confinement for almost 4 days, deprived of adequate food and water, and denied any sense of time,” he remarked.
Loffredo wasn’t the first or only journalist to report on Iran’s retaliatory military operation on October 1, but his video report on the missile damage attracted significant attention.
The details of the attack and the damage it caused were not reported in the Israeli or mainstream Western media.
Loffredo said the lack of coverage of Iran’s retaliatory operation by the Israeli media reflects a deeper issue: an “entrenched ideological patronage system” within the Israeli regime.
“Israeli investigative journalists prioritize loyalty to the military over their responsibility to inform the public and any news that portrays Israel as vulnerable, it’s often suppressed or downplayed in mainstream media,” he told the Press TV website.
He said that it remains “unclear” why Israeli authorities targeted him specifically, but noted that their intelligence services claimed his reporting for Grayzone included “more precise details on missile impact locations than those reported by other outlets.”
MNA
