Arrests Follow an Intelligence Operation
The police account, published on October 9, describes intelligence work by the foreign nationals desk of the central investigative unit in the Judea and Samaria district. It alleges that the two came to harvesting areas in Samaria, in the West Bank, intending to provoke confrontations and public disturbances.
According to that account, soldiers from the Binyamin regional brigade made the arrests and transferred the pair for questioning at an interagency headquarters. The report does not identify a particular village or provide the detainees’ names and nationalities. Those omissions prevent a reliable match with other reports about foreign visitors detained during the harvest.
What Police Alleged
Police alleged that the two supported the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and portrayed terrorist organizations as legitimate. The account also referred to statements calling for Israel’s destruction and attempts to generate media campaigns against the country.
These are allegations about the individuals, not judicial findings. The reproduced statement refers to intelligence and an assembled evidentiary basis, but does not provide the statements, recordings or other material on which the allegations rest. It also does not establish membership in a named terrorist organization.
The public account therefore supports reporting what police suspected and what enforcement steps followed. It does not support treating all of those suspicions as proven conduct or assigning an organizational affiliation that the statement itself leaves unspecified.
An Immigration Decision Remains Separate
After questioning, investigation material was referred to the Population and Immigration Authority for a hearing and a decision on removal, the report says. That procedural description does not establish that a final deportation order had already been issued or that the two had left Israel.
No response from the two individuals or their representatives was included in the report reviewed for this article. Their identities were not disclosed, and no case number or court decision was provided. That does not establish that they lacked representation or declined to comment.
Harvest Enforcement and an Earlier Case
The arrests came amid discussion of restrictions on foreign activists during the harvest. On October 8, i24NEWS reported that Defense Minister Israel Katz had instructed officials to pursue administrative exclusion orders against activists whose activities were found to threaten order and security, following a request from Yesha Council chairman Israel Ganz.
That report describes ministerial instructions; it does not establish that either detainee was covered by a specific signed order. Nor does it connect them to every organization mentioned in broader reporting about the season.
A separate precedent dates to October 2025. The Times of Israel reported on October 22 that 32 activists had been expelled and given 99 year entry bans over alleged identification with the Union of Agricultural Work Committees. Their lawyer, Lea Tsemel, said they had not known about a closed military zone order.
Those comments concern the earlier group only. The current case involves two people and a referral for an immigration decision. A verified outcome of that process, and a response attributable to these particular detainees, would be the next substantive developments.
