Netanyahu blames ‘juvenile delinquents’ for blocking Khanna on West Bank visit

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed “juvenile delinquents” for stopping and harassing Rep. Ro Khanna’s (D-CA) delegation in the West Bank.

In a Saturday post on X, Khanna said that while visiting the West Bank, he was stopped and detained by “Israeli settlers, brandishing American-made M4s.” He said that when the Israel Defense Forces arrived at the scene, “they sided with the settlers & continued our detention.” Netanyahu disputed the telling of events in a Sunday appearance on NBC News’s Meet the Press, putting the blame on young troublemakers who weren’t representative of the settler community.

“We’re a country of laws, and people who break the law, we take them to court,” Netanyahu said.

He then shifted to describing the dangers to settlers in the area.

“In the West Bank, in Judea and Samaria, we’ve had thousands, thousands of attempted attacks and warnings against terrorist activities, against innocent Israelis, families, mothers with their children driving along the road, they’re stopped by terrorists, and they kill them. And this has happened again and again and again,” Netanyahu said.

“There is a vigilante effort, not by the settler community, they’re 99.9% law-abiding citizens, they work, they serve in the army, and so on. There are 150 juvenile delinquents that are not part of that community. They come from the other parts of Israel. … I don’t want vigilantes of any kind, and we are working to put them under the law,” he added.

Khanna rejected the Israeli government’s characterization of events.

“The IDF is lying,” he said. “What happened was unprecedented. They had violent settlers detain American citizens, including an American government official. You had these settlers brandishing M4s, kicking the tires of our van, laughing at us, mocking us, videotaping us. We were detained for about 20 minutes, fearful of our lives.”

Netanyahu appeared on the show before Khanna, giving the California Democrat a chance to directly respond.

“Now I heard the prime minister, and here he says that Israel is a country of law and order. Well, let me be very specific: The prime minister needs to open an investigation on these violent settlers who are connected to Yinon Levy, who has destroyed Zenuda’s village and is a known person who has killed Palestinians. And these settlers were connected to him,” he said.

ISRAELI SETTLERS DETAIN RO KHANNA IN WEST BANK

Khanna demanded that everyone connected to Levy be prosecuted and for an investigation to be opened into the four IDF officers who allegedly sided with the settlers against Khanna and his delegation.

“Security cameras can see that they were involved in the detention of American citizens. How dare they mistreat people with an American passport that way?” he said.