"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, a progressive lawmaker from California in the U.S. House of ​Representatives.

"And these hoodlums come in with machine guns – M4, an American-made machine gun – 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 military.

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 U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem for help. A group ​of officers who appeared to be police eventually intervened, leading to their release, Kasky said.