What happened in the olive grove
Congressional candidate Brad Lander said Wednesday that Israel Defense Forces detained him in the occupied West Bank while he took part in an olive harvest. Lander, a former New York City comptroller running in New York's 10th district, told NBC News he was later released with a warning.
Lander said he was harvesting olives for Palestinians alongside more than 40 international volunteers, including Americans, and 28 Israelis. The participants were affiliated with a coalition of human rights groups. Lander said the detention came after about two hours of work, when the group noticed what he believed was a security car from an Israeli settlement watching them.
Soon afterward, IDF soldiers and police officers arrived and asked for passports, he said. The harvesters were put on a bus and driven to a military station in the West Bank. Lander said the group was not told to leave before being detained and added that if authorities had asked, "we would have left."
Competing accounts of the detention
Lander said Israeli authorities told him the group's actions were illegal and amounted to "causing a disturbance of public order." He rejected that characterization, saying the volunteers were peacefully harvesting olives.
The IDF gave a different rationale in a statement. It said soldiers, border police and other officers detained people harvesting olives "due to the security risk posed by conducting an uncoordinated harvest near an Israeli community." The military said harvesting in the area requires a request to be submitted to the relevant authorities before the olive harvest season begins, and that such coordination is necessary "to ensure the security of the area and maintain public order."
Lander and a spokesperson for Protect the Harvest, one of the groups involved, said the grove had not been harvested since Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023 attacks. Lander said Palestinian farmers had not felt safe tending their trees because of the grove's proximity to a nearby Israeli settlement.
Releases and reaction
Beck Strober, a spokesperson for Protect the Harvest, told NBC News on Wednesday afternoon that all but four of the detained people had been released. Strober said the Israeli members of the group will not be allowed back into the West Bank for 28 days.
Lander said he believed he was freed because of his "public profile," noting that Israeli authorities kept calling him "congressman." He said he told them he was not a member of Congress but a primary winner. "Releasing me is not going to change the facts of occupation," he said.
A communications firm for T'ruah, a Jewish human rights group, said in a press release that the group's CEO and 11 other U.S. rabbis affiliated with it were among those detained. CEO Rabbi Jill Jacobs called the IDF's actions "an outrageous abuse of power" and said, "We will not be intimidated into silence."
Background: settler violence and a politically charged race
The detention followed a week of prominent settler attacks on Palestinians and others, according to NBC News. One injured Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine, and another targeted European diplomats. Israeli police said earlier this week that they arrested 10 people suspected of taking part in the violence.
A United Nations report from July said more than 900 Palestinians had been injured in settler attacks since the start of the year. The same report said 76 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank had been killed by Israeli forces or settlers, or had died from their injuries, over that period.
Lander's Democratic primary against Rep. Dan Goldman was dominated by the candidates' views toward Israel, NBC News reported. Both men are Jewish. Lander has been more critical of Israel's government and the war in Gaza, which he has called a "genocide."
Lander was also detained last year with more than 70 others, including about a dozen elected officials, while trying to inspect conditions at an immigrant detention facility in New York City. Earlier this year, he was found not guilty of misdemeanor charges related to that incident.
