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Congressman Ro Khanna is accusing the Israeli military of “lying” about his detention in the West Bank, where he says armed settlers and Israeli soldiers held him and other American citizens for more than an hour.

Getting into it: According to Khanna, he was touring the occupied West Bank on Wednesday when his group’s van was surrounded near Khirbet Zanuta, a Palestinian village in the southern part of the territory that was emptied out after violent settler raids drove residents from their homes in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. Khanna, a California Democrat openly weighing a 2028 presidential run, said his group was looking at the destroyed village, including its demolished school, when armed men blocked the road.

The Israeli military claims its troops “quickly dispersed the Israeli civilians, and reopened the blocked road” and that its soldiers “did not take part in blocking the road.” Khanna shredded that account Sunday on “Meet the Press.”

“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 at us, videotaping us. We were detained for about 20 minutes, fearful of our lives. Then the IDF comes, four soldiers. They tell our translator that they’re on the side of the settlers. They further detain us and block us in.”

Khanna said the group was only released 75 minutes after he reached the US embassy, and he’s demanding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu open investigations into both the four soldiers involved and the settlers, who he says are connected to Yinon Levi, a man he described as having destroyed Zanuta and killed Palestinians. His version is backed by Nadav Weiman, director of the Israeli human rights group Breaking the Silence, who was with him and wrote that “the settlers were giving the orders not the other way around.”

Netanyahu, appearing on the same program, called Israel “a democracy and a country of laws” and blamed the incident on a “vigilante effort” by what he characterized as “150 juvenile delinquents” rather than the broader “law-abiding” settler community. “I don’t want vigilantes of any kind,” he said.

Israeli officials, meanwhile, have gone on the offensive rather than apologizing. Israel’s ambassador to the US, Michael Leiter, accused Khanna of coordinating his trip with “Palestinian activists and with J Street” instead of the Israeli government, and suggested without evidence that Khanna timed the release of his video to deflect attention from his earlier backing of Graham Platner, a theory that drew an audible laugh from CBS host Margaret Brennan, who pointed out that Khanna had requested the story stay under wraps until his group was out of Israeli-controlled territory.