A prominent Democratic US lawmaker from California, Ro Khanna, has said he was "detained" by armed illegal Israeli settlers along with other Americans during a visit this week to the occupied West Bank and said the Israeli military was complicit in the incident.

"Israeli settlers, brandishing American-made M4s, detained me & other Americans on my trip to Palestine," Khanna said in a post on X on Saturday.

"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.

When the Israeli military arrived at the scene, he added, "They sided with the settlers & continued our detention. They made a huge mistake."

Footage and accounts provided to The New York Times by Khanna and his team show a group of armed men blocking the road outside a small village in the southern West Bank and swearing at them in Hebrew and Arabic.

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 US Embassy for help.

US lawmaker and his team were near Khirbet Zanuta, a small Palestinian hamlet whose residents were forcibly displaced by violent settler raids after October 2023.

Khanna told the Times that when the Israeli forces arrived at the scene, the soldiers spoke to the settlers and subsequently blocked the road themselves when the settlers left.

After calls to the US embassy and Israeli police, Khanna said he was allowed to pass.

According to the Palestinian Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, illegal Israeli settlers carried out 3,488 attacks across the West Bank during the first half of this year, killing 17 Palestinians.

Since October 8, 2023, the Israeli army's and illegal settlers’ attacks in the occupied West Bank have killed 1,179 Palestinians and wounded 12,666 others, in addition to the arrest of around 24,000 people.