By Chris Menahan – Information Liberation
American journalist Jeremy Loffredo was released on Friday morning after four days in Israeli detention but ordered to remain in the country to allow investigators “more time to bring additional allegations or to further interrogate [him],” The Intercept reports.
American journalist Jeremy Loffredo was released Friday morning by Israeli authorities after spending four days in Israeli detention following his arrest in the West Bank.
Although an Israeli judge granted his release from police custody, he was ordered to remain in the country until October 20, allowing investigators more time to bring additional allegations or to further interrogate Loffredo, according to Lea Tsemel, a renowned Israeli civil rights attorney who represented Loffredo. Police obtained Loffredo’s phone and were able to jailbreak the device and plan to search it for potential evidence, according to Israeli media.
Israeli police had held Loffredo, an independent journalist from New York, on suspicion of assisting an enemy in war, a serious allegation that carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment or death, Tsemel said. The allegations stem from his reporting for American media outlet The Grayzone, which showed the locations of several Iranian missiles launched at military targets inside Israel earlier this month, including footage near Nevatim, an Israeli air base, and the Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv, Tsemel said. Though the same targets were featured in broadcasts by other media outlets, Israeli authorities tried to argued that Loffredo’s reporting allowed Iran to study future targets.
“He didn’t do anything original — he took it from different sources that were published already, all over, by Israeli and foreign journalists,” Tsemel told The Intercept, who decried the government’s attempts to charge Loffredo as “nonsense.”
The Grayzone has more on the case:
On October 9, an Israeli court declared it had “reasonable suspicion” to extend the journalist’s imprisonment. At a hearing the next day, the police insisted to Magistrate’s Court Judge Zion Sahrai that Loffredo was not an actual journalist, but did not present any evidence that he was pursuing a hostile ulterior agenda.
A journalist from the Israeli publication YNet countered the allegation that Loffredo violated Israeli censorship laws by pointing out that the military censor approved his own article in which a tweet containing Loffredo’s full video report for The Grayzone was embedded.
Judge Sahrai ordered Loffredo’s release, stating that since Israeli military censors agreed to allow Ynet to publish both “word of [Jeremy’s] arrest and the publications that led to his arrest,” Israel could “no longer justify his continued detention.”
However, the police appealed Sahrai’s decision, protesting that the censor only approved the YNet article retroactively, and would have never done so if it had been submitted in advance.
That police also complained that Loffredo had refused to unlock his phone for them, insisting they needed more time to crack the device. “We believe that we will find things on the phone and we will be able to link him [to the alleged crime],” a police representative stated.
That argument did not hold water with Jerusalem District Court Judge Hana Miriam Lomp, however. “The Court of First Instance did not err when it ordered the release of the respondent,” Judge Lomp stated during the October 11 appeal. “From the detailed investigative actions there is no fear of disruption [from Jeremy], and in light of the reasons stated above, the cause of the danger is also not clear.”
Though Lomp ordered the journalist be released, she gave police until October 20 to continue their digital strip search. Until then, Loffredo will remain without his passport and will not be permitted to return home to his family in the US.
One of the foreign journalists he was embedded with said in a statement on X that their group was threatened at gunpoint and abused by the Israeli Army:
From Andrey X:
I was illegally detained by the Israeli Army with four other journalists. Here’s what happened:
On October 8th 2024, at approximately 01:00 PM, a car with five journalists (an American journalist, a Palestinian journalist, a Russian-Israeli journalist, a Canadian-Israeli videographer, and an Israeli photographer) was stopped at a checkpoint in the northern West Bank. The checkpoint separates Areas C and B, all the journalists are allowed to be on both sides by Israeli occupation law. They were held for an hour and a half in their car, while the IOF collected their documents. The IOF searched the car, going through personal items. The photographer later discovered that her underwear was removed from her bag, placed on top of their belongings.
The soldiers then illegally requested that the journalists hand in their phones, and when they refused, the soldiers pointed a gun at one of the journalists, hit him with their hands and the barrel of a gun, then dragged him out of the car and slammed him onto the concrete. When lying on the ground, they pointed 2 guns at his head. The rest of the journalists exited the car and the military raided it, confiscating phones, cameras, and personal items.
The journalists were told to sit in the sun, in 35°C heat on the side of the road. After an hour, the Palestinian journalist began to feel faint and requested an ambulance be ordered. The soldiers refused and didn’t let anyone move to the shade, shouting insults and Israeli nationalist slogans. After two hours, the soldiers handcuffed and blindfolded the journalists. The Israeli photographer had a panic attack and started throwing up, and after stating she was Israeli, was allowed to remain without a blindfold. The Palestinian journalist was left in the sun for two more hours, then he was released. In the meantime, the other four journalists were stacked on top of each other into a military jeep, and taken to a military base. There they were held blindfolded and handcuffed on the floor for two hours, while being insulted and interrogated by the soldiers. The soldiers told the female Israeli photographer that she should have been raped by Hamas.
At approximately 04.00 PM the IOF passed the illegally detained journalists to the police, who took them to the police station. The two male journalists remained blindfolded until arriving at the Maale Adumim Shai Police Station in an illegal Israeli settlement 1 hour later. At the station, the journalists were forced to be photographed in front of an Israeli flag with a nationalist slogan on it, while the officers were insulting them. A journalist was threatened with physical violence for smiling.
The journalists were interrogated in regards to their political affiliation and work, refused the right to see a lawyer, denied food and water until many repeated requests (the two male journalists were denied food completely). The two female journalists were released without charges at 11:00 PM. The Russian-Israeli journalist was released at midnight. The American journalist was held for three days and was released Friday, October 11th. The army confiscated two phones and one camera that they have yet to return.
This marks a precedent for IOF treatment of Israelis and internationals, but this is the standard procedure for kidnapping Palestinians across the West Bank.
Israel has killed at least 128 journalists and media workers since October 7th, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.