United States Democratic congressional candidate Brad Lander says he has been released from Israeli military custody with a warning after being detained on Wednesday alongside dozens of volunteers who were helping Palestinian farmers harvest olives in the occupied West Bank, according to reports citing Lander and the Israeli organisation Rabbis for Human Rights.

Source: Reports via Barbados Gazette / news syndication of Rabbis for Human Rights account

Rabbis for Human Rights said about 80 volunteers — American, Israeli, Palestinian, British and Canadian — had accompanied farmers near the village of Nahalin, outside Bethlehem, for about two hours when Israeli soldiers and police arrived, declared the area a closed military zone and took the group to a police station. Other reports put the number detained at around 90 and said former deputy attorney general Yehoshua Schoffman was also among them.

Lander, a former New York City comptroller who is the Democratic nominee for New York's 10th District, wrote on X that he was released apparently because of his public profile and called for the others to be freed immediately. 'Harvesting olives isn't a crime under any law I know,' he wrote. Two Israeli lawyers who work on such cases told NPR the incident was the largest mass detention of activists in the occupied West Bank in at least a decade, according to reporting on the case.

The Israeli government had not responded to a request for comment in the reports published on Wednesday. The volunteers say they were on private Palestinian land with the farmers' permission and had agreed to leave the area before they were detained — claims attributed to the group and not independently confirmed by Israeli authorities in those reports.

Why the olive harvest is a flashpoint

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has reported that settler attacks linked to this olive harvest season have already exceeded last year's total, with more than 200 attacks recorded, one Palestinian killed, more than 120 people injured and over 2,500 olive trees or saplings damaged, according to UN reporting cited by WAFA. The UN human rights office says between 80,000 and 100,000 Palestinian families depend on the olive harvest as a primary source of livelihood.