{"id":890134,"date":"2026-10-22T00:18:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T00:18:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/890134\/"},"modified":"2026-10-22T00:18:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T00:18:10","slug":"new-york-congressional-candidate-brad-lander-says-idf-detained-him-in-the-occupied-west-bank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/890134\/","title":{"rendered":"New York congressional candidate Brad Lander says IDF detained him in the occupied West Bank"},"content":{"rendered":"

Congressional candidate Brad Lander said Wednesday<\/a> that the Israel Defense Forces detained him in the occupied West Bank while he was participating in an olive harvest.<\/p>\n

Lander, who is running in New York\u2019s 10th District, said in an interview that he was later released with a warning.<\/p>\n

Lander, a former New York City comptroller, said he was harvesting olives for Palestinians in the West Bank along with more than 40 international volunteers, including Americans, and 28 Israelis, who were affiliated with a coalition of human rights groups. Israeli authorities told him that his actions were illegal and that the group had been \u201ccausing a disturbance of public order,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\"BradBrad Lander, who shared this image of himself on a bus, has been more critical than his opponent of Israel\u2019s government and the war in Gaza, which he has said is a \u201cgenocide.\u201d@brad.lander \/ Instagram<\/p>\n

\u201cBut I assure you, all we were doing was harvesting olives,\u201d he said. \u201cSo if by \u2018disturbance of public order\u2019 they mean the order of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, I guess maybe, but we were very peacefully harvesting olives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beck Strober, a spokesperson for Protect the Harvest, one of the groups involved in the volunteer effort, told NBC News on Wednesday afternoon that all but four of those who were detained have been released. The Israeli members of the group will not be allowed to return to the West Bank for 28 days, Strober said.<\/p>\n

Lander later said on X<\/a> that everyone in the Protect the Harvest delegation has been released but that the multiweek ban for Israelis in the group \u201cmeans they will be unable to participate in the olive harvest.\u201d<\/p>\n

The IDF said in a statement that soldiers, border police and other officers detained people harvesting olives \u201cdue to the security risk posed by conducting an uncoordinated harvest near an Israeli community.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHarvesting in this area requires a request to be submitted to the relevant authorities in advance of the start of the olive harvest season,\u201d the IDF said. \u201cThis coordination is necessary to ensure the security of the area and maintain public order.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lander told NBC News that he was apparently released from detention because of his \u201cpublic profile,\u201d adding that Israeli authorities kept calling him \u201ccongressman.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI tried to explain to them I wasn\u2019t a member of Congress, just a primary winner,\u201d he said, referring to the Democratic primary this year. \u201cIf they don\u2019t want a diplomatic or international incident, they should stop state-sponsored ethnic cleansing. Releasing me is not going to change the facts of occupation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lander\u2019s 10th District primary race against Rep. Dan Goldman was dominated by the candidates\u2019 views about Israel. Both men are Jewish, and Lander has been more critical of Israel\u2019s government and the war in Gaza, which he has said is a \u201cgenocide.\u201d<\/p>\n

The olive grove in which the group was volunteering had not been harvested since Hamas\u2019 Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, according to Lander and the spokesperson for Protect the Harvest. Lander said Palestinian farmers \u201chaven\u2019t felt safe to harvest their olive trees\u201d because of the grove\u2019s proximity to a nearby Israeli settlement.<\/p>\n

Last week brought high-profile Israeli settler attacks<\/a> on Palestinians and others, including one in which Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine was injured and another that targeted European diplomats. Israeli police said this week that they arrested 10 people suspected of participating in the violence against Palestinians and others.<\/p>\n

More than 900 Palestinians had been injured in settler attacks since the start of the year, a United Nations report<\/a> said in July. The report said 76 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank were killed by Israeli forces or settlers or died from their injuries since the start of the year.<\/p>\n

Lander and other volunteers were detained after about two hours of harvesting, when, Lander said, the group spotted what he believed to be a security car from an Israeli settlement watching them. Shortly afterward, a group of IDF soldiers and police officers arrived and asked the group for passports, he said. Eventually, the harvesters were loaded onto a bus and driven to a military station in the West Bank.<\/p>\n

The group was not asked to leave before being detained, Lander said, adding that if Israeli authorities had asked, \u201cwe would have left.\u201d<\/p>\n

The CEO of T\u2019ruah, a Jewish human rights group, and 11 other U.S. rabbis affiliated with it were among those detained, a communications firm for the organization said in a news release.<\/p>\n

In a statement, T\u2019ruah CEO Rabbi Jill Jacobs called the IDF\u2019s actions \u201can outrageous abuse of power, and part of a systematic, state-backed campaign of ethnic cleansing aimed at driving Palestinians from their land.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will not be intimidated into silence,\u201d she said later in the statement.<\/p>\n

Lander previously posted that he was visiting the occupied West Bank with Protect the Harvest, which he said was \u201cbringing people together from around the world to help Palestinian farmers harvest olives in the face of state-sanctioned settler terrorism.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOur goals for the trip are to help protect the olive harvest \u2014 and to shed a light on the reality of the occupation,\u201d he said Monday on X<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Last year, Lander was detained with more than 70 other people, including about a dozen elected officials, as they tried to inspect the living conditions at an immigrant detention facility in New York City. He was found not guilty<\/a> this year of misdemeanor charges related to the incident.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Congressional candidate Brad Lander said Wednesday that the Israel Defense Forces detained him in the occupied West Bank…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":890135,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-890134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=890134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890134\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/890135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=890134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=890134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=890134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}