US embassy reportedly sent Israeli ‘social worker’ to interrogate jailed American journalist
“She did not offer me any food or water... only asked why I hurt Israel...”
Grayzone reporter Jeremy Loffredo was “informally deported” from Israel on Monday, after having been arrested and imprisoned by the Israelis — who accused him of “aiding the enemy during wartime and providing information to the enemy” — earlier this month.
The arrest had taken place just days after the American journalist filed an on the ground report about the Iran’s October 1 missile strikes on Israel. Several other journalists were detained at the same time, but the others were let go later that evening.
The criminal case against Loffredo quickly “fell apart after an Israeli journalist testified that his own article containing [his] full video report had cleared military censorship,” The Grayzone reported on October 11. “Yet Israel refuses to let Loffredo leave the country.”
In a new interview with Grayzone editor-in-chief Max Blumenthal, Loffredo, who is now back home in New York, recounts his experience — including the “help” he received from the US embassy in Israel.
‘Why did you hurt Israel??’
After Loffredo’s arrest, numerous journalists and concerned citizens called the US State Department, only to be rerouted:
“For every righteous person demanding answers from the State Department [about Jeremy’s] incarceration in an Israeli dungeon for the crime of factual reporting on genocide, be aware callers are being directed to the US embassy in Israel,” wrote Grayzone reporter Kit Klarenberg on X on October 9, before providing the phone number.
“I just called the US Embassy in Israel and was rather snippily directed to either call the IDF (LOL!) or send an email to the Embassy’s American Citizen Services – JerusalemACS@state.gov,” one person replied. “I did the latter. Perhaps we can all flood this office with emails.”
“No perhaps about it,” said Klarenberg, and a campaign began to lobby the embassy to intervene on Loffredo’s behalf.
Speaking to Blumenthal during a livestream on Thursday, Loffredo said that, after three days in solitary confinement in Israel with almost no food or water, the US embassy’s apparent response was to send an Israeli “social worker” to “check on” him.
“I thought to myself, kind of a sigh of relief, like ‘Okay, this person’s at least going to give me WATER.’ And her first question was, ‘Why did you hurt Israel?? You hurt Israel…’”
“So [even she] is treating me like a terrorist. Did not offer me any food [or] water; only asked why I hurt Israel and if I love Israel…”
Max: “Did the US embassy provide you with any other assistance…?”
Jeremy: “No. […] they [did] nothing for me except send me an Israeli to interrogate me further…”
(This interview clip is also available on X and Substack Notes.)
‘The Courage Barrier’
Over the past year, Loffredo has produced numerous important exposés from within Israel, including:
“My [October 2024] report had information that had already been reported [by other media outlets],” Loffredo said during an X Spaces discussion on Friday, adding that he thinks the Israelis’ motive had more to do with the “other critical, actual groundbreaking reporting that I’ve done in Israel in the past.”
“So, I don’t think that they were being entirely honest with why they were coming after me,” he said. “It wasn’t because of this video; they just managed to use this video [as an excuse] to put an independent journalist in jail for a little while.”
“You know, by doing this, they raise the ‘courage threshold’ so high to report in Israel that no one would dare go there, because they know that they might get thrown in prison for 25 years for simply doing their job,” he said. “I mean, the courage threshold to report in Gaza right now is you have to be willing to get your head blown off immediately. So it’s like, they raise it so high to stop anyone from traveling to Israel to do critical reporting. And that’s how they censor and close off the media ecosystem.”
Regarding his point about Gaza: Even CNN and the New York Times have started reporting in recent months on the widespread torture at Israeli detention centers, including Israelis beating Palestinian captives, forcing them to wear diapers, forcing them to sit on electrified chairs, and penetrating their rectums with a “hot metal stick”, causing bleeding, “unbearable pain” and at least one reported death.
In addition to various other intimidation tactics such as menacing anonymous phone calls to journalists, Israel has flat out killed well over 100 of them over the past year (by some counts 176+), and currently seems to be setting the table for even more targeted assassinations of Palestinian reporters – the world’s eyes and ears in Gaza – in the coming days and weeks, as they continue to massacre civilians in the north.
Blumenthal’s full, must-see interview with Loffredo can be viewed on The Grayzone’s YouTube channel, or below.
This article was originally published at decensored.news. For more reporting like this, please follow Decensored News on multiple platforms, bookmark the website, and subscribe here on Substack:
The Star of David is a swastika
Yes I read this.
Social workers.....they are supposed to make sure you are comfortable in extreme circumstances.
I had many "social workers' in my life in the great British Empire.
They visited my home (single parent family) They had suggestions BUT no remedy.