60 Minutes Transcript: The West Bank, where Israeli settler violence against Palestinians is surging

October 11, 2026 / 7:00 PM EDT / CBS News

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…

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