60 Minutes Transcript: Visiting the West Bank as settler violence surges

Israel has been at war with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza, ever since the massacre of October 7, but there's another increasingly volatile battleground: the West Bank, which has been under Israeli military occupation for six decades.

On the west bank of the Jordan River, it's home to over 3 million Palestinians, who hope to make it the heart of their future state. It's also home to over 500,000 Jews who call this Judea and Samaria, their biblical homeland. They built communities here called settlements in the hope of making this part of Israel. 

In recent months, some militant settlers are ramping up their campaign to violently drive out the Palestinians who live there -- often with impunity -- the Israeli government showing an unwillingness to crack down on the violence. With the Israeli election two weeks away, we headed to the arid hilltops of the West Bank that have seen shepherds come and go for thousands of years.

This is a biblical story: you have two populations – Jewish and Arab; the descendants of Abraham's sons: Isaac and Ishmael fighting over ancestral lands. But with all of today's high tech warcraft – AI, drones, supersonic missiles – the weapons they're using here are sticks and stones and sheep! 

Mordehai Minster: Sheep are amazing. They're dumb, but they're amazing creatures.

Mordehai Minster cofounded this sheep farm. It's a new kind of settlement here in the West Bank from where his herd is driven deeper and deeper into the surrounding Palestinian communities.

Lesley Stahl: So the idea is you send your sheep down to graze, and then you can say, "That's my land because my sheep are grazing on it"? 

Mordehai Minster: When you have sheep, everyone understands. Arabs tend to fight over grazing lands among themselves. It's a language that we understand, and they understand. And it's a way to delineate the border. This is where I graze my sheep. You don't take your sheep here. You don't plant here. You don't build here. 

The sheep have taken over huge swaths of land: 20% of the West Bank. In one Palestinian village after the next, herds from these farms have pressed in, and the village shepherds pushed out. The mayor of Burq:

Sayel Kanan: They actually seized the land with the-- their sheep. 

The settlers even push sheep into people's homes. A teacher in Al-Mughayyir:

Waheed Marsouq: They enter, they open the gate of the house and take the sheep inside to eat the trees around the house. 

Some 200 sheep farms have popped up in recent years changing something fundamental: for decades Jewish settlers have put up fences to protect themselves from the active threat of Palestinian terrorism; now it's the Palestinians who are penning themselves in.

Lesley Stahl: This is kind of new these kinds of farms dotting the West Bank.

Mordehai Minster: Correct

Lesley Stahl: And a lot of them, including this one, have used violence against the villages down around you. 

Mordehai Minster: Whenever you have ethnic religious communities, especially in the Middle East, fighting over land and resources, that conflict sometimes gets ugly. The fact that violence exists doesn't change the merit of the right that we have to this land. 

The violence is often carried out by these young shepherds known as "Hilltop Youth," who have flocked here for a sense of adventure, told they're on a God-given mission to redeem the land. 

So they routinely storm Palestinian fields and villages, harassing farmers and livestock, cutting olive trees -- over 1,600 incidents so far this year. They've torched cars and destroyed property: there's a hardcore of up to 500 of them. Up to a thousand more drift in and out.

Lesley Stahl: How did they get here? Who are they?

Mordehai Minster: Those are kids that are ranging age between, I don't know, 15 and 25. They don't do great in school. They don't get into the army that easily 'cause maybe behavioral problems. So some of them end up in places like this, taking care of sheep, doing construction. Some of these kids may have drug problems. They smoke pot. They grow pot.

Lesley Stahl: The American ambassador to Israel has said that the violence against these Palestinian farmers is terrorism. He's called it thuggish and disgusting.

Mordehai Minster: I wouldn't classify it as terrorism, but are there some children who overreact and act in thuggish ways and need to be controlled and held in? Yeah, definitely.

Lesley Stahl: People have died.

Mordehai Minster: Yes. None of this is great and none of this changes the fact that our right to be here is legal and it's ancient.

This is not how the Palestinians who live directly down the hill from his farm see it. 

Mahmoud Faraj: They come over here and they shepherd here. 

Mahmoud Faraj's family has had the deed to this land for generations. We talked to him, his cousin Hassan, and Hassan's daughter Salma, about their village called Jannatah, that means paradise.

Hassan Faraj: Actually it was a paradise until the 26th of March when a group of settlers invaders entered to our land, our property, private property, and they establish a tent. They were something like 20 people, 25 people. And they started to behave that they are the owners of everything.

Hilltop Boys set up this outpost -- what Hassan calls a tent -- literally in his backyard, cutting off access to one of their family's houses.

Mahmoud: This is my cousin's house over there. He's not allowed to go there at all.

The young shepherds are trying to force the villagers to leave.

Hassan Faraj: They are succeeding. If you go around them you will see many houses, they just left really empty. Abandon, they abandoned their property. They steal electricity from the locals and they also steal water. This is their strategy, to make the area unlivable. 

Every time the family tries to get near their house, they say teens from the outpost rush down to beat them up. In March, Hassan tried with his uncle and cousin Muhammad.

Hassan Faraj: Within few seconds they started to attack us in small groups with wood sticks and with stones. And they have tear gas. And three of them, they were armed. So one of the armed guys, he started to shoot. He shot my cousin in his head. And it didn't stop here. They came and they started to beat my uncle and his son, who was dead, with wood-- with wood sticks. [Sigh]

Lesley Stahl: Was anybody prosecuted for the death of your cousin?

Hassan Faraj: It's an open case--what's so-called.

Muhammad's family is skeptical. Only a tiny number of these cases ever get prosecuted.

Muhammad's brother, also named Hassan, tried to take us to the family's house. But within seconds, the Hilltop Youth in their black hoodies came running down the hill, one after the other. Soon the teens were blocking Hassan from reaching the house in the distance - some were very young. As they shoved and rammed, Hassan kept his hands behind his back so they couldn't accuse him of hitting them. 

Lesley Stahl: That means I'm not fighting with you?

Roie: Yes. 

A group of Jewish activists called Sons of Abraham were there as well. What they do is try to protect Palestinians under siege. They stepped between Hassan and the teens like human shields, the idea being that settlers would be more hesitant to attack other Jews, as opposed to Hassan.

Roie: They are trying to push us back. They don't want us to enter with the cameras. So they are pushing and waiting for someone to react with their hands so they have an excuse for more extreme violence.

Most of the activists – like the settlers – grew up in right-wing religious homes. This young woman was once a Hilltop Youth herself, but Amana, Dvir and Roie say Judaism calls on them to protect, not expel, their neighbors. 

Lesley Stahl: So here's something that I heard, Amana, that when the settlers see you, they get even angrier because they see you as traitors.

Amana: (In Hebrew/English translation) I think they are angrier because we threaten them ideologically. And also, I'm not coming from the outside. I also grew up as a settler. I tell them//I changed my ways. I know what you're doing and I know it's not the right way.

Lesley Stahl: Do you know each other? And do they recognize you, you recognize them?

Amana: (In Hebrew/English translation) Yes, sometimes. 

Lesley Stahl: You know them?

Amana: Yes. 

Lesley Stahl: Yeah. It must be painful for you. 

Roie: I think it's painful for me to see how people I grew up with, and some of them were good friends of mine, behave.

Lesley Stahl: But he must say that about you.

Roie: Probably.

One of the older boys was particularly belligerent: so much for Jews not attacking Jews.

Bnaya: What are you?

Lesley Stahl: Oh I'm an American Journalist. Television.

Bnaya: And you in with Hamas?

Lesley Stahl: No.

He really got into it with Hassan, headbutting him in the face. 

Lesley Stahl: Oh. They're really hurting people now.

Roie: Yes. 

Hassan shouted back: "This is my land and you won't stay. These are my roots." Then - he got bashed again, this time fracturing his nose. Hassan and the activists decided it was time to retreat, but the settlers blocked them.

Lesley Stahl: Are all your people out? 

Roie: No no. There's still two. 

Lesley Stahl: Still two? 

Roie: Yeah. 

Just as things were getting out of hand, a captain in the Israeli army turned up, seemingly out of nowhere. The soldiers had to go down the road to rescue the last two activists and then he told all of us to clear out.

Lesley Stahl: But are you gonna let the boys go back there?

Captain: They are going to go back to where they are. That's–

Lesley Stahl: From up there.

So Hassan was kicked off his own property. The Jewish youth got to stay. The army's priority is the settlers. Some soldiers are settlers themselves and occasionally join the violence. Though there've also been cases where the soldiers have been attacked by the young settlers.

The Trump administration has called on Netanyahu to deal with the violence and he has condemned it. But his government has poured tens of millions of dollars into expanding the sheep farms, arming them and giving them American-made off-roaders.

Roie: People call it "settler violence." I don't agree with that. It is state violence. There is a violence of a government. 

Hanging over all of this are the midterms in the U.S. in three weeks. If the Democrats win, they're threatening to limit military aid to Israel in part because, they say, of the West Bank attacks. 

Lesley Stahl: What about American public opinion. Do you worry that what's going on–

Mordehai Minster: I do.

Lesley Stahl: --here is going to result in Israel losing military aid from the United States?

Mordehai Minster: I am bothered by the fact that America's turning on us, and we're turning on America. It's, like, I see it as losing a friendship. And I'm also concerned that, as a military ally, as a political ally, we may lose America as well. It looks like it's going in that direction. But Israel will find other allies. 

Lesley Stahl: You're not worried enough about it to dial back?

Mordehai Minster: No. I am worried about that. But I don't look at it as-- as an existential threat.

Meanwhile over 100 Palestinian communities have been displaced or erased by the settler violence and the ever-encroaching sheep.

Produced by Shachar Bar-On. Field producer, Roni Aboulafia. Associate producer, Jinsol Jung. Broadcast associate, Aria Een. Edited by Mike Levine. Assistant editor, Aisha Crespo