A prominent Democratic US lawmaker from California, Ro Khanna, has said he was “detained” by armed illegal Israeli settlers along with other Americans during a visit this week to the occupied West Bank and said the Israeli military was complicit in the incident.
“Israeli settlers, brandishing American-made M4s, detained me & other Americans on my trip to Palestine,” Khanna said in a post on X on Saturday.
“We were at a village that Israeli settlers had destroyed; they had destroyed the school, they had destroyed that village, and we were just looking at it,” said Khanna.
When the Israeli military arrived at the scene, he added, “They sided with the settlers & continued our detention. They made a huge mistake.”
Footage and accounts provided to The New York Times by Khanna and his team show a group of armed men blocking the road outside a small village in the southern West Bank and swearing at them in Hebrew and Arabic.
An aide to Khanna who was in the group, Cameron Kasky, said they were held for more than an hour and made appeals to the US Embassy for help.
