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Brad Reed at Common Dreams:

Rep. Ro Khanna this week was detained by a group of Israeli settlers whom he described as “hoodlums... with machine guns” while making a visit to a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank. In an interview with Reuters published on Saturday, Khanna (D-Calif.) said he and his tour group were surrounded by armed settlers as they were traveling through the West Bank on Wednesday. “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,” said Khanna. “And these hoodlums come in with machine guns—M4, an American-made machine gun—and they detain us. They block off the road.” The California Democrat said that the settlers called in members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to help them deal with him and his group. “The IDF is on their side,” Khanna remarked, “not on the side of the Americans.” Cameron Kasky, an aide to Khanna, told Reuters that the group was held for over an hour before officials whom he believed to be police intervened and secured their release.

[...] Israeli settlers for years have carried out violent attacks on Palestinians living in the West Bank, and witnesses have regularly described IDF soldiers at the scene either standing by as the attacks occur or even actively helping the attackers.