US Democratic lawmaker Ro Khanna said he was detained by extremist Jewish settlers armed with US-made rifles during a West Bank visit this week that he described as an “unfiltered look at the human toll of Israeli occupation,” Palestinian media reported
Speaking with Reuters last Thursday in a Palestinian village, Khanna said his group’s van was encircled by settlers wielding M4 rifles a day earlier while touring a part of the southern West Bank where residents face frequent settler attacks.
“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, a lawmaker in the House of Representatives, said.
“And these hoodlums come in with machine guns, M4, an American-made machinegun, and they detain us. They block off the road. And then they call the IDF and the IDF is on their side, not on the side of the Americans,” Khanna said, referring to the Israeli occupation forces.
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 in Jerusalem for help before Israeli police forces appeared later.
