It's strange, somehow I thought I had already seen a response to this.

Some more details, this happens for an entity that has a field mapped like this:

@ManyToMany(fetch = FetchType.LAZY)
@JoinTable(name = "X_A_B", joinColumns =

,
inverseJoinColumns =

)
private Set<Item> items;

And it happens when I fetch this entity from the DB, delete it via entityManager.remove(entity), and then invoke getItems().