Israeli forces have detained 90 people, including US congressional candidate Brad Lander, during an olive harvest in the occupied West Bank, as the Israeli regime intensifies its military raids across the territory.

According to Israeli rights group Rabbis for Human Rights, Lander, the Democratic Party nominee for New York’s 10th congressional district, was accompanying Palestinian farmers during an olive harvest near Bethlehem and had been supporting them for around two hours when Israeli forces arrested him.

“I’ve been detained by the Israeli military, along with a group of rabbis & volunteers,” Lander said in a post on the social media platform X on Wednesday, sharing a picture of himself on a bus.

“We were simply harvesting olives in a grove” in the West Bank, he continued. “The occupation is a crime under international law. Harvesting olives isn’t a crime under any law I know.”

Lander previously posted that he was visiting the occupied West Bank with the “Protect the Harvest” coalition, which he said was “bringing people together from around the world to help Palestinian farmers harvest olives in the face of state-sanctioned settler terrorism.”

“Our goals for the trip are to help protect the olive harvest — and to shed a light on the reality of the occupation,” he said in a post published on X on Monday.

Lander, a political ally of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, has been critical of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza that has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians and wounded over 175,000 others, while destroying around 90% of the civilian infrastructure in the besieged strip.

Two Israeli lawyers, who work on similar cases, described Wednesday’s incident as the largest mass abduction of activists in the occupied West Bank in at least a decade, NPR reported.

Rabbi Arik Asherman, a longtime Israeli human rights proponent, also called the abductions “unprecedented.”

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In a press release, T’ruah, a Jewish human rights group, called the Israeli military actions “an outrageous abuse of power, and part of a systematic, state-backed campaign of ethnic cleansing aimed at driving Palestinians from their land.”

Last week, illegal Israeli settlers carried out two high-profile assaults in the occupied West Bank, injuring Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine in one attack and targeting European diplomats in another.

A United Nations report published in July said more than 900 Palestinians had been injured in Israeli settler attacks in the occupied West Bank since the start of the year, while 76 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces or settlers, or died of their injuries, over the same period.