A group of extremist Jewish settlers equipped with US-made M4 rifles detained US lawmaker Ro Khanna and his group during their visit this week to the southern occupied West Bank, the Democratic representative has disclosed.
"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," Khanna told Reuters on Thursday. "And these hoodlums come in with machine guns – M4, an American-made machine gun – and they detain us. They block off the road." Khanna said, adding, "And then they call the IDF and the IDF is on their side, not on the side of the Americans."
Khanna's aide, Cameron Kasky, said the delegation was held for over an hour near Khirbet Zanuta, a Palestinian hamlet ethnically cleansed by Israeli settlers in 2023, before appealing to the US Embassy in Jerusalem to free them.
Khanna's visit to the occupied West Bank comes as support for Israel splits Democrats ahead of the US midterm elections in November, with the issue contributing to primary defeats for incumbent lawmakers financed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Israel's favorability rating among Democratic voters has fallen from 59 percent in 2018 to 22 percent in May 2026, according to recent polls.
The US lawmaker's confrontation with extremist settler groups occurs amid a broader campaign of state-supported settler violence that, by mid-2026, has escalated into systematic ethnic cleansing and land theft in the occupied West Bank.
As of July 2026, illegal settler outposts effectively control 18 percent of the occupied West Bank, following an "unprecedented" expansion directly backed by the Israeli government.
Former Israeli officials have characterized the current escalation as a "systematic campaign" of "Jewish terrorism" intended to facilitate de facto annexation of the Palestinian territories.
An Oxfam analysis based on UN data revealed that since 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have killed at least 1,244 Palestinians, exceeding the total from the previous 17 years combined, and forcibly displaced nearly 46,000 people.
Over 540 settler attacks were reported in the first quarter of 2026 alone, alongside a record 925 movement obstacles that restrict Palestinian life.
Amnesty International concluded, based on independent investigations, that the Israeli government is implementing a policy of ethnic cleansing, supported by digital evidence, satellite imagery, and field investigations.
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More of Rep. Khanna's account of what happened...