Arya News - Lander says dozens remain in Israeli custody after being detained while helping Palestinian farmers harvest olives.
United States Democratic congressional candidate Brad Lander says he has been released from Israeli military custody with a warning after being detained alongside dozens of volunteers helping Palestinian farmers harvest olives in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday.
But several dozen others, including rabbis and international volunteers, remain in detention, according to Lander, who called for them to be released immediately.
“I’ve been released from IDF custody with a ‘warning,’ apparently because of my public profile,” Lander wrote on X. “I told them I wasn’t even a congressmember yet, just a nominee.”
Lander, a Jewish American and former New York City comptroller, was among approximately 80 volunteers detained by Israeli soldiers and police near the village of Nahalin, outside Bethlehem, according to the Israeli organisation Rabbis for Human Rights.
The group included American, Israeli, Palestinian, British and Canadian volunteers.
Beck Strober, a representative of the Protect the Harvest Coalition, which helped organize the olive harvest, told Al Jazeera that the group had been peacefully picking olives at the invitation of a Palestinian family for several hours when the Israeli army arrived.
“It was a nice, peaceful day,” he said. “There was no conflict. There was no settler violence. There was no violence of any kind.”
According to Strober, after a while, soldiers began checking the volunteers’ IDs, and soon after, issued an order declaring the area a closed military zone. They then detained the group, first in the field and later at a police station.
“To this moment, everyone’s still detained except for Brad Lander,” said Strober. “They very clearly told him that they allowed him to be released because he’s likely to be in Congress very soon.”
Anton Goodman, acting director for Rabbis for Human Rights, told Reuters that volunteers who were neither Israeli nor Palestinian citizens were expected to be transferred to an Israeli military base.
In a video posted on X from one of the buses, Lander said Israeli forces had detained the group after apparently being called to the area by settlement security personnel.
“We’ve been detained by the Israeli military for harvesting olives,” he said. “And let’s be clear, occupation is a crime under international law. Harvesting olives is not a crime under any law.”
It’s not clear why the area was declared a closed military zone. Rabbis for Human Rights said they had no way of knowing about the order and had offered to leave voluntarily when they were told.
Lander said the volunteers had been taken away for processing but had not been told whether they were under arrest.
Lander, a vocal critic of Israel’s war on Gaza, is a former New York City mayoral candidate and an ally of Mayor Zohran Mamdani. He’s now running as the Democratic nominee for New York’s 10th congressional district in the November 3 midterm elections.
Writing on X after his release, Lander said Palestinians face worse consequences every day.
“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 wrote. “Yet one more element of escalating, and very clearly state-sponsored, ethnic cleansing.
Neither the Israeli government nor the US Embassy in Jerusalem immediately responded to a request for comment.
The volunteers had travelled to the West Bank to support Palestinian farmers during the annual olive harvest, amid a surge in settler violence, including several attacks in recent days targeting Palestinians and international observers.
Stober said Wednesday was the first time the Palestinian family had been able to access its own land since October 7, 2023 because violence in the area had made it too dangerous to return.
“The fact that Brad was thee, of course, made the situation more newsworthy, but we’ve been seeing this happen in the West Bank for years.”
On Friday, an American photojournalist working for The Washington Post was beaten by Israeli settlers while covering the olive harvest. The following day, European diplomats and a French mayor were attacked by settlers during another harvest. Palestinians were also attacked in both incidents.
Israeli police said on Tuesday they had arrested 10 people in connection with the attacks.