Grim’s Tales: Ryan Grim’s Anti-Israel Drop Site

When The Free Press broke the news in August that a dozen viral photographs, supposedly of starving Gazan children, in fact depicted children with unusual medical disorders, not everyone in the media reacted with chagrin. One journalist, Ryan Grim, said that the name of The Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold “will become notorious for a generation.”

The editors of The Free Press thought that was rich. They pointed out that neither Grim, nor several other writers who took time away from their independent journalism to excoriate Reingold, disputed her reporting. Reingold’s transgression, it seemed, was to notice that truth had poked holes in the narrative of the total culpability of Israel regarding the conflict in Gaza.

Grim’s Substack blog, Drop Site, has garnered nearly 400,000 subscribers peddling that narrative with widely varying degrees of journalistic probity. An astonishing number of its claims are sourced to itself, or to nowhere. Some of its reporters have uncomfortably close connections to Hamas. The blog has also backed up its analysis with reporting by an anonymous X account given to spreading conspiracy theories. It is largely dedicated to portraying Israel’s effort to defeat Hamas as evil when the campaigns are successful and futile when they’re not. While Drop Site describes itself as non-partisan and independent, it may as well be the Washington, D.C. news bureau for Hamas.

Grim founded Drop Site with The Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill in 2024. Grim is the author, most recently, of The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution (2023), of which The Guardian said, “The book seems to have been written at great speed without much time for editing.”

Drop Site carries on in that vein. On weekdays it issues Drop Site Daily, bullet lists of paragraph-length news summaries in five sections. The top section is “The Genocide in Gaza.” In one recent missive, readers learned, “At least 29 people have been killed by Israeli forces across Gaza since dawn,” according to an unlinked report by Al Jazeera that apparently did not distinguish whether the dead were civilians or combatants. (At 30 deaths per day currently, this is the first “genocide” in history in which the killings of the supposedly targeted population are fewer than its births.) Drop Site also reported that the Gazan health care system “continues to collapse,” with three hospitals closing, according to, apparently, no one.

An item reporting that “explosive-laden robots are being detonated” in the Gaza neighborhood of Tel al-Hawa was linked to a post by the Drop Site X account featuring a seven-minute video submitted by Abdel Qader Sabbah. Sabbah was a freelance journalist for CNN and the Associated Press until The Jerusalem Post reported last year that he “appeared in photographs with senior Hamas leaders online and actively praised terrorists while also carrying out unnamed tasks for the terror organization.”

The last item of that day’s “Genocide in Gaza” section cited an X post from the Interior Ministry of Israel characterizing the latest iteration of the Global Sumud Flotilla, the one from which Greta Thunberg was removed, as “organized by Hamas [and] intended to serve Hamas.” The ministry announced that it would not be allowed through Israel’s naval blockade. Drop Site called that characterization false, without evidence. (Past flotillas have indeed been linked to Hamas.)

The long-form reporting is hardly better. Sabbah’s byline appears over nearly 20 reports at Drop Site, including a September 15 story titled “Panic as Israel Warns High Rises in Gaza City Will Be Struck With Minutes to Get Out.” Sabbah’s affiliation with Hamas was too much even for CNN. But it evidently does not trouble Ryan Grim, who appears to be repeating the terrorist organization’s narrative of the conflict as uncritically as he cites the widely questioned death toll figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health.

Drop Site has also extensively platformed Abubaker Abed, who brings with him a touching story of arrival in Ireland earlier this year as a malnourished 22-year-old refugee from Gaza. He told the Irish Independent that he was working as a sports journalist, covering soccer, but became a reluctant war reporter for the conflict in Gaza.

Prompted by Abed’s four appearances as an interviewee on BBC programs, investigative journalist David Collier looked into his background. He found Abed’s X post celebrating the January 27, 2023 shooting of seven Jewish worshipers outside a synagogue in Jerusalem, and another post gleefully declaring “Allahu Akbar” regarding news of the October 7 attacks. In May 2023, Abed took to X to post a story about the release of Islamic Jihad terrorist Ammar Abed from prison. It was a short, happy, vertical video that neglected to note that the two are cousins. The younger Abed’s reportage was clearly not confined to soccer before the Israeli reprisal, and one has reasons to doubt its objectivity.

Nevertheless, Abed’s byline appears alongside almost 20 Drop Site reports. One of them, from April, bears the harrowing title “Under Relentless Israeli Bombing and Lacking Everything, a Gaza Hospital Is Triaging Genocide.” While the situation at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital sounded dire, Abed strangely neglected to remark that in the prior October, the IDF struck a Hamas command center operating there, using ailing children as human shields. If that strike was unwarranted, wouldn’t it bear mentioning?

Lastly, there’s the matter of Grim’s editorial judgment regarding his own work. His social media-optimized news recap videos regularly feature Pallywood, staged scenes of Palestinian suffering that make American soap operas look high-budget and well acted. This, like the strategically mischaracterized photojournalism discovered by The Free Press, is a curious phenomenon of a war with no shortage of real agony.

Grim’s analysis is often declamatory. In July, The Dinah Project, an Israeli organization that advocates for justice for victims of sexual violence during the October 7 attacks, published a report titled A Quest for Justice, October 7 and Beyond. Grim responded that the report repeated debunked claims of sexual violence. His citation for this linked to an X post by Grim, which said, “It does not matter what’s true, only what the Western press wants to be true. So there’s really no point going into it further, but here are a lot of the receipts.”

Those “receipts” were in a reposted July 8 thread by an X account running under the name “zei squirrel,” who introduced them like so: “Today the Israeli death and rape-cult that has actually been engaged in systematic pedophilic gang-rape of Palestinian children, girls, boys, women, and men is going to desperately try to re-launch the genocidal atrocity propaganda rape hoax.” Grim’s assessment of A Quest for Justice hinged on the testimony of a pseudonymous social media presence. Not only is the account spreading denialism about Hamas’s self-documented perpetration of sexual violence in the October 7 attacks, it insists that the real sexual offenders in this discussion are the Israelis.

It’s no wonder that Grim thought Olivia Reingold at The Free Press had earned a generation of notoriety. His business is the perpetration of a one-sided understanding of Israel that could not be more tendentious if Hamas was producing it. Perhaps, at least in some ways, it is.

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