On Tuesday, following the release of American Israeli hostage Edan Alexander from captivity in Gaza, Axios’s Barak Ravid broke the news that back-channel talks between a Hamas official and Donald Trump ally Bishara Bahbah had enabled the return of the IDF soldier to Israeli territory. This crucial reporting explained how the Trump administration bypassed the Israeli government to negotiate the release, with Israeli officials telling Ravid that they found out about the ongoing discussions from their own intelligence organization, rather than directly from the White House.

Few are better positioned to cover the tensions between the Trump administration and the Israeli government than Ravid, an Israeli journalist who moved to Washington, DC, to tackle the 2024 election. “Covering foreign policy and national security in Washington, as somebody who came from another country, it’s like going to Disneyland,” Ravid tells me. “I’m a sick person, but it’s just so much fun.”

When Ravid, 44, moved from Tel Aviv to Washington, he intended to cover the presidential election from a foreign policy and national security perspective, but “you know how you make plans, and the world has other plans?” he asked when I recently met him at Axios’s Arlington, Virginia, headquarters. The first few months in the US, Ravid spent time building his sources within the Republican Party. “And then October 7 happened,” he said.

Ravid recalls Axios cofounder Mike Allen suggesting he focus all his energy on covering the ongoing conflict in Gaza. Reflecting on this “tragic year and a half,” Ravid believes he was “able to give something that a lot of people in Washington couldn’t.” Indeed, Ravid delievered scoop after scoop on the conflict, often adding context to the growing rift between the US and Israeli governments over the handling of the aftermath. It was also helpful, he says, reporting from a distance. “I had family that was affected. I had friends who were affected, people who I knew were murdered,” he tells me of the Hamas attack on Israeli soil. “I don’t know if I would have been able to do the same kind of work if I was on the ground at that time. The distance allowed me to do the work in a more sober way, in a less emotional way.”

Beyond the ongoing conflict in Gaza, Ravid broke news this week on the Trump administration’s written proposal of a nuclear deal with Iran, and he has distinguished himself in reporting on the Russia-Ukraine war, revealing details of Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which included Elon Musk, in the days following the election. “That story felt like some sort of watershed moment where I can say, ‘Okay, I can also do this,’” Ravid tells me. “I’m not a one-trick pony.”

Zelenskyy himself even took notice, singling out the reporter at the Munich Security Conference in February. “I never saw your face. I always heard about Axios, that you’re always after my phone calls with some leaders. You know what’s going on,” Zelenskyy said. “Where do you get your information?” he jokingly asked. “I’ll tell you after,” Ravid responded.

“That was a nice moment,” Ravid says when I asked about his work being validated by someone of that stature, adding that it was the first time he had met Zelenskyy in person. “He’s a fascinating politician to cover. He’s very accessible in many ways,” Ravid adds. “There are a lot of similarities to covering Zelenskyy and covering Trump, because they’re very accessible. They’re very media-savvy.”

Ravid’s path to journalism was unconventional, at least when compared to his American counterparts. As an Israeli citizen, he was required to serve in the IDF for a minimum of 32 months. Ravid extended his service to six years, serving as an officer for the 8200 unit , which is the Israeli army’s main information- and intelligence-gathering unit. Just five days before his discharge, his commander offered him a job as chief of staff to then prime minister Ariel Sharon’s military secretary, Yoav Gallant —who was later Israel’s defense minister until being fired by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2024. Gallant wanted Ravid to follow him to the Southern Command six months later. Ravid declined, saying, “Thank you, but no thanks. I’m going to take a year off and do other things.”

Instead, he called a friend at Maariv, then Israel’s second-largest paper, which was building out its digital division. A week after leaving the army, Ravid was working as a junior news desk editor. “Almost nobody goes to journalism school in Israel,” he says. “It’s like many other things in Israel that are very informal and to the point of chaos.” During that time Ravid also attended Tel Aviv University, where it took him five years to earn a bachelor’s degree in Middle East history, “because it was much more fun to work in journalism and not go to university,” he tells me.

Ravid’s first reporting job came in 2006, covering newly elected prime minister Ehud Olmert. His first day on the job coincided with Olmert’s first in office. Months later, Israel went to war with Lebanon. “It was really like baptism by fire,” Ravid recalls. He later became a diplomatic correspondent at Haaretz, one of the few Israeli newspapers publishing in English, which allowed Ravid to build a loyal English readership.

In 2017, Ravid moved to Israeli TV news, but soon worried he was losing his English audience. A friend connected him to reporter Jonathan Swan, who was then at Axios but has since moved to The New York Times. After a phone call, Swan suggested that Ravid try writing for Axios, “no strings attached.” Ravid recalls his first visit to the Arlington office: “Mike [Allen] and Jim [ VandeHei ] were sitting in the same office, and it was really, really small. And we just started working together, almost unofficially. The rest was history.”

When Ravid left TV in 2020, Axios proposed a Tel Aviv newsletter for him to anchor. Ravid was able to create “a community” through the newsletter, making personal and government contacts which helped facilitate his move to Washington, with his family, in the summer of 2023. Though new to covering a US presidential election, Ravid had experience in Trumpworld; he interviewed the president and members of his inner circle, like Jared Kushner, for a 2021 book , Trump’s Peace: The Abraham Accords and the Reshaping of the Middle East.

Given his experience, Ravid has been especially well-positioned to cover two major global events—the Israel-Hamas war and Trump’s second administration—and their intersection. He’s also faced increased scrutiny over his past, with pro-Palestinian demonstrators disrupting Ravid’s November talk at Columbia University’s Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life by walking out as the conversation got underway. The Columbia University Apartheid Divest organization criticized the university for inviting Ravid, accusing the journalist of being a “henchman of genocide.” (At the time of the protests, more than 10,000 Palestinians had been killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza, according to Hamas. As of publishing, Hamas reports that more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed.)