--- title: "Brad Lander held for about three hours by Israeli forces at a West Bank olive grove, then released" url: https://badiyaa.com/brad-lander-detained-west-bank-olive-harvest/ published: 2026-10-22T12:41:15+01:00 modified: 2026-10-22T10:02:08+01:00 section: US publisher: Badiyaa --- # Brad Lander held for about three hours by Israeli forces at a West Bank olive grove, then released The New York House nominee was let go with a warning while dozens of rabbis and volunteers stayed in custody. Israel says the harvest near Beitar Illit was not coordinated; Lander disputes that. Brad Lander, the Democratic nominee for New York’s 10th Congressional District, spent roughly three hours in Israeli custody on Wednesday, October 21, after soldiers and police stopped a volunteer olive harvest in a grove near the Palestinian village of Nahalin, outside Bethlehem in the West Bank. He was let go with a warning. Dozens of the rabbis, activists and farmers detained alongside him were held into the evening. The former New York City comptroller, who faces voters on November 3, was there with Protect the Harvest, a coalition that brings foreign and Israeli volunteers to pick olives beside Palestinian families during the autumn harvest. Lander announced his release on X: > I’ve been released from IDF custody with a “warning,” apparently because of my public profile (I told them I wasn’t even a congressmember yet, just a nominee). ## How the day unfolded The accounts below come from Lander, the organizers and the Israeli military. They agree on the sequence but not on why it happened. - **Morning:** The group spent about two hours picking olives on land the volunteers say belongs to a Palestinian family that had not harvested it since October 7, 2023. One farmer, a 77-year-old woman named Fahimeh, said in an interview in the grove: “For three years we have not harvested any olives.” - **Arrival of forces:** Soldiers and police checked passports, declared the area a closed military zone and detained those present, including some of the Palestinian harvesters. - **Processing:** Detainees were put on buses and driven to a police and military facility near Bethlehem. Lander said he spent about an hour there and was accused of disturbing public order and of entering an area his tourist visa did not cover. - **Release:** Lander walked out first. By Wednesday night the New Israel Fund, one of the sponsors, said about 90 volunteers had been freed, and Lander wrote that the whole delegation was out. ## How many were held depends on who is counting No single official tally has been published. Rabbis for Human Rights put the number detained at about 80. Lander, in an interview, described more than 40 international volunteers plus 28 Israelis. Two US Jewish groups said 33 of those held were American citizens, and T’ruah said its chief executive, Rabbi Jill Jacobs, and 11 other American rabbis were among them. Two Israeli lawyers who handle such cases described it as the largest mass detention of activists in the West Bank in at least a decade. The penalties also differed by passport. Lander said most Americans were released without charges, while Israeli participants were barred from the West Bank for periods he put at 15 to 30 days. A coalition spokesperson put the Israeli ban at 28 days, and Lander wrote that it means those volunteers will miss the rest of the harvest. ## The Israeli military’s account The Israel Defense Forces said soldiers, border police and other officers acted “due to the security risk posed by conducting an uncoordinated harvest near an Israeli community,” a reference to the nearby settlement of Beitar Illit. “Harvesting in this area requires a request to be submitted to the relevant authorities in advance of the start of the olive harvest season,” the military said, adding that the coordination “is necessary to ensure the security of the area and maintain public order.” On Lander specifically, it said: “Regarding reports of the detention of a congressional candidate, we note that he was released once the matter was brought to our attention.” Reporting in Israel on Wednesday said a map the Civil Administration had given Palestinian farmers placed the grove outside the zones that need prior coordination. The military’s reply, as reported, was that the site was not marked because farmers had never asked to harvest there before. Israel’s Foreign Ministry went further, calling the visit a “calculated political provocation” in a post on X. “This was not about harvesting olives. It was about harvesting headlines,” the ministry wrote. “Brad Lander came looking for a confrontation. Now he is pretending to be its victim.” It said his team had been told in advance that coordination with the authorities was required. ## Lander’s account Lander said nobody on his team reached out to Israeli representatives ahead of the visit. He said his office reached the US Embassy after he arrived and got a general recommendation, not an instruction, to coordinate visits. He also said nobody asked the group to leave before the detentions and that it would have gone if told to. “We were on private Palestinian land. We were with the farmers whose land it is. There’s no obligation to coordinate with the Israeli military,” he said in a radio interview. The organizers’ language was sharper. Jacobs called the military’s actions “an outrageous abuse of power” and part of what she described as a state-backed campaign to drive Palestinians off their land. Israeli authorities reject accusations of ethnic cleansing. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Lander ally, wrote: “Harvesting olives is not illegal. The occupation is.” ## Why it lands in a New York House race Lander won the June Democratic primary against Rep. Dan Goldman in a contest dominated by the two men’s views on Israel. Rep. Ro Khanna of California was also briefly detained in the West Bank, in July. The episode also follows a week of settler attacks during the harvest, including the beating of an American photojournalist; Israeli police said Tuesday they had arrested 10 suspects. Lander said he would sign on to the Stop the Settlements Act, introduced by Rep. Joaquin Castro on October 1, once he reaches Congress. He told reporters he expects to fly home on Saturday, October 24, ten days before Election Day, and to vote early. ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: Brad Lander](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Lander) - [Wikipedia: Nahalin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nahalin) - [Wikipedia: Israeli occupation of the West Bank](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_occupation_of_the_West_Bank) *Image: Ameer shakarneh, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*