Israeli forces detained U.S. Democratic congressional candidate Brad Lander on Wednesday as he helped Palestinian farmers harvest olives in the occupied West Bank, releasing him hours later while dozens of other volunteers, including a group of American rabbis, remained in custody.
The incident was the latest in an annual olive harvest that has been marked by violence between Israeli settlers and Palestinian villagers attempting to gather their crops.
The Israeli military said the farmers and volunteers had failed to seek prior approval for the harvest and were detained “due to the security risk posed by conducting an uncoordinated harvest near an Israeli community.” It later added that it viewed “the arrival of dozens of activists as an act intended solely to provoke, which undermines the harvesting process.”
Lander is running in the U.S. elections on Nov. 3 to represent a heavily Democratic New York district in the U.S. House of Representatives.
“The occupation is a crime under international law,” Lander wrote on social media after he was detained. “Harvesting olives isn’t a crime under any law I know.”
“These detentions by the IDF are one more attempt to undermine Palestinians’ right to harvest their olive groves, travel on their roads, and live in their homes,” he added in a post after his release.
This year, Palestinians have been required to coordinate with the Israeli military to access more of their privately owned farmland than in previous years. The anti-settlement group Peace Now said last week that the army had expanded by nearly 30% the area of farmland that Palestinians cannot enter without prior approval, to 34 square miles. The Israeli military declined to comment on the exact figures but said Palestinian farmers must coordinate access to areas under Israeli security control.
The detained volunteers were taken to a police facility. Lander was among them but “released after it became known that he was a congressional candidate,” the Israeli police said in a statement.
Israeli rights group Yesh Din and the Palestinian Farmers’ Union have said the 2026 harvest has been the most violent in recent history, with hundreds of reported thefts, clashes and arson attacks.
Much of the violence has unfolded on land outside Palestinian villages, where Palestinians have historically harvested olives and Israeli settlers have increasingly erected outposts without authorization from Israel’s government.
But there were no clashes before Israeli forces arrived Wednesday, according to Beck Strober, a spokesperson for Protect the Harvest, the advocacy group that organized the volunteers at the grove.
Jill Jacobs, one of a dozen American rabbis detained, condemned the Israeli government restricting the ability of Palestinians to harvest freely.
“The Israeli government is actively advancing the forced displacement of Palestinian communities across the West Bank, using its military to deny Palestinians access to their land and intimidate those who stand alongside them,” Jacobs, chief executive of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, said in a statement.
Lander, who was endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, defeated U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman in a primary for New York’s 10th congressional district. The race was viewed as a referendum on the Democratic party’s support for Israel. Both candidates are Jewish and have criticized Israel, but only Lander called the war in Gaza a genocide.
Lander was not the first U.S. politician detained in the West Bank this year. U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, said Israeli forces detained him during a visit in July.
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