Foreign correspondent Trey Yingst has spent years simultaneously preparing for this moment and hoping it’d never come. “I wish it didn't happen, but it did. And so I have a job to do,” he says. The 30-year-old journalist moved to Israel in 2018 for Fox News. He uses Tel Aviv as a home base while traveling to other hot spots—Ukraine, Afghanistan—to provide sustained coverage from the region.
Now the biggest crisis is in his backyard. Thousands of Israeli and Palestinian civilians have been killed in the war that began over two weeks ago, when Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls Gaza, attacked Israel by air, land, and sea, killing around 1,400 and taking more than 200 hostages. The shocking attack marked the most significant breach to Israel defenses in half a century. Israel has responded with air strikes on Gaza, where a ground invasion is imminent. Yingst has spent the past few weeks reporting from southern Israel amid an endless stream of strikes, and traveling with his team—an engineer, cameraman, producer, and security team—to tell the stories of border communities that became sites of execution. In between news hits, he’s posted frequently on social media as a way to document what he’s seeing in real time. “I want to get it right, and I want to make sure people know the details of what took place,” he says.
“It is really the worst-case scenario for the people on the ground, and I feel I’m in a unique position to cover it because I’ve had five years to source up,” says Yingst. He’s looked to those sources for clarity amid a barrage of conflicting claims and disputed information, such as the recent bombing of a hospital in Gaza City that Hamas government officials claimed was caused by an Israeli airstrike, but that Israel soon denied responsibility for, claiming it was caused by a misfired rocket launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another armed group based in Gaza. Major media organizations have been caught in the uncertainty: The New York Times on Monday released an editors’ note admitting that they “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified” in their early coverage of the blast. “There is no room for the fog of war among journalists,” says Yingst. “We have to be patient. We have to be disciplined.”
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Yingst discussed the challenges the media faces in covering this war, the necessity to get it right, and the parts of the job that the public doesn’t see.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Vanity Fair: How has your life changed in the past few weeks?
Trey Yingst: So war has a way of changing you, and it's not something I've just seen here on the ground in southern Israel but in conflicts and hot spots around the world: Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iraq. This war is different though, because I live in Tel Aviv. Despite the fact that I'm traveling much of the time—last year covering the war in Ukraine, I was there for 185 days—this is my home base. And so it's a story that I know very well. I've been preparing for this moment for years, hoping it would never come. It is really the worst case scenario for the people on the ground, and I feel I'm in a unique position to cover it because I've had five years to source up. I've been inside Gaza reporting there numerous times. We've covered many rounds from Southern Israel. I have sources not just inside Gaza, but deep in Hamas and Islamic Jihad; among civilians in Gaza, but also in the Israeli political realm. And over the past five years, I've been really one of the only reporters in the world that has very close access to the Israeli military and leadership and also very close access to the factions in Gaza and that leadership.
Can you talk about where you were when this war started and what it was like covering it in the early days?
I was home on a Saturday morning sleeping and got a phone call from my producer and she said, look, something's happening in the South. I knew it had to be important because she called on a weekend, early in the morning around 7:00 AM. So I immediately got up and I got on the phone with our vice president of news coverage, Greg Headen, and he just said, look, let's get down there. Around [the time of] that phone call, [Hamas] started firing rockets toward Tel Aviv. So just after I got off the phone with my boss, there were rockets fired toward my apartment. They were intercepted literally above my apartment and I saw a rocket slam into the sea. I had a vest in my apartment, I put it on, and went out to the balcony, and immediately started reporting, I know I've covered enough of these rounds that if they're firing on Tel Aviv, that's a significant story in itself.
