A U.S. Congressman discovered first-hand what life is like for Palestinians living in the West Bank. He went there — without a government-approved tour guide — to see what the occupation looks like. Israeli settlers detained Rep Ro Khanna at gunpoint.
On Wednesday, July 8, armed Israeli settlers surrounded and blockaded the California Democrat’s van near Khirbet Zanuta, a small Palestinian village in the southern West Bank.
The settlers were carrying M4 rifles — American-made weapons — and they held a sitting member of the United States Congress and his team for more than an hour.
Khanna and his group had just finished looking at what was left of the village, including an elementary school that extremist settlers had destroyed.
That’s when young armed men arrived, circled the vans, cursed at the group, filmed them, and blocked the road.
Khanna described them as ‘hoodlums with machine guns.’
Then it got worse.
When Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers showed up, Khanna says they didn’t help the Americans. He told Reuters the n called the IDF and “the IDF is on their side, not on the side of the Americans.”
According to his office, one soldier even moved a car to help block the road.
An aide who was in the group, Cameron Kasky, said they appealed to the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem for help and were only released after officers who appeared to be police finally intervened.
Khanna publicly thanked embassy official David Brownstein for, in his words, helping rescue them — language you’d expect from a hostage situation, because functionally, that’s what this was.
The story was first reported by The New York Times, whose photojournalist witnessed the encounter.
This isn’t a he-said-she-said. A journalist watched it happen.
The IDF’s denial doesn’t hold up
The Israeli military insists its soldiers “did not take part in blocking the road” and says troops dispersed the settlers and reopened it.
An Israeli security source also complained to Haaretz that Khanna hadn’t coordinated his trip in advance — which was the point.
Khanna deliberately planned a visit led by Palestinians, without Israeli government minders, because he wanted an unfiltered view of the occupation.
But here’s the context that makes the IDF’s version hard to swallow: soldiers who harm Palestinians in the West Bank almost never face consequences.
The Israeli human rights group Yesh Din found that out of 2,427 complaints against soldiers between 2016 and 2024, fewer than 1% led to indictments.
And as we documented in our explainer on Israeli settler violence, the line between settlers and soldiers has all but disappeared — the military arms settler “emergency squads,” guards illegal outposts, and routinely stands by (or joins in) while settlers attack Palestinian communities.
“Imagine what is happening to Palestinian families”
Khanna understood immediately what his detention actually revealed. In a statement, he said: “imagine what is happening to Palestinian families who are just trying to live.”
He’s right, and Khirbet Zanuta is the proof.
The village where Khanna was detained doesn’t really exist anymore.
Its residents were forcibly displaced by violent settler raids after October 2023 — an entire community that packed up its homes and left because the attacks never stopped and no one was coming to protect them.
That’s not an isolated tragedy. It’s policy by another name.
Human Rights Watch reports that armed settlers are invading Palestinian communities daily — firing live ammunition, burning homes and cars, attacking families — and that 2026 is on track to surpass 2025, already a two-decade high for settler killings.
The UN says more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since the war began.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in July 2024 that the occupation itself is unlawful and amounts to apartheid, ordering Israel to remove its settlers entirely.
Israel responded by approving thousands of new settlement units.
And on the very Saturday Khanna’s story broke, Israeli police arrested four settlers for attacking CNN and other journalists in the West Bank.
A congressman on Wednesday. Reporters on Saturday. Palestinians every single day in between — without embassies to call, without arrests, without headlines.
American weapons, American silence
There’s one detail Khanna kept returning to, and it should stick with every U.S. taxpayer: the rifles pointed toward his van were M4s. American-made.
The settlers terrorizing Palestinian villages are doing it with weapons that trace back to us, in territory the U.S. government continues to shield from meaningful accountability.
Roughly 15% of the West Bank’s settlers are themselves American citizens.
Khanna, who is openly weighing a 2028 presidential run and says this trip made him more resolved to consider it, put the challenge to his own party bluntly.
Standing above a valley dotted with settler outposts, he said Democratic leaders who won’t speak up for Palestinian human rights are “morally compromised.”
He’s calling on Israel to prosecute both the settlers and the soldiers who detained American citizens.
Watch whether that happens.
History says it won’t.
And that impunity — extended even to men who held a U.S. congressman at gunpoint — tells you everything about what Palestinian families face when the cameras aren’t there.
