Israeli forces detained U.S. Democratic congressional candidate Brad Lander on Wednesday while he was helping Palestinian farmers harvest olives in the occupied West Bank and released him hours later, The Associated Press reported. Dozens of other volunteers remained in custody, including a group of American rabbis, after the military said the harvest had not been coordinated with Israeli authorities.
The detentions occurred amid an annual olive harvest that frequently turns violent between Israeli settlers and Palestinian villagers collecting crops. The Israeli military told reporters that the farmers and volunteers had not sought prior approval and were detained “due to the security risk posed by conducting an uncoordinated harvest near an Israeli community.” The military later added that it viewed “the arrival of dozens of activists as an act intended solely to provoke, which undermines the harvesting process,” according to the AP.
Several advocacy and rights groups described this year’s harvest as unusually violent. Israeli rights group Yesh Din and the Palestinian Farmers’ Union said the 2026 season has seen hundreds of reported thefts, clashes and arson attacks. Much of the tension, they and other observers say, has unfolded on land outside Palestinian villages where settlers have increasingly erected outposts without authorization from Israel’s government.
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Access to farmland has also been restricted this year. The anti-settlement group Peace Now reported that the army expanded by nearly 30% the area of farmland Palestinians cannot enter without prior approval, to about 34 square miles (88 square kilometers). The Israeli military declined to comment on Peace Now’s exact figures but reiterated that Palestinian farmers must coordinate access to areas under Israeli security control, AP said.
The volunteers detained at the grove were taken to a police facility. Israeli police said Lander was among them but was “released after it became known that he was a congressional candidate,” according to the AP account.
Lander, who is running in the Nov. 3 U.S. election to represent a heavily Democratic New York district, criticized the detentions on social media after his release. He wrote, “The occupation is a crime under international law.” He added, “Harvesting olives isn’t a crime under any law I know.” In a later post he said, “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.”
Protect the Harvest, the advocacy group that organized volunteer work at the grove, said there were no clashes before Israeli forces arrived. Beck Strober, a spokesperson for the group, told the AP that volunteers were not engaged in confrontations when detained.
Among the detained were about a dozen American rabbis. Jill Jacobs, chief executive of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, condemned what she described as restrictions on Palestinians’ ability to harvest their land. “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 said in a statement reported by the AP.
Lander won a primary against U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman for New York’s 10th congressional district and has been endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, AP noted. The primary campaign was viewed as a referendum on parts of the Democratic Party’s approach to Israel; both Lander and Goldman are Jewish and have criticized Israeli policy, but Lander has publicly called the war in Gaza a genocide.
He was not the first U.S. politician detained in the West Bank this year. California Democrat Rep. Ro Khanna said Israeli forces detained him during a visit in July, according to the AP.
