Every Saturday, sheep owned by Jewish settlers march through the olive groves that Rezeq Abu Naim and his family have tended for generations, crushing tree limbs and damaging roots. The extremist settlers, armed and sometimes masked, lead their herds to drink from the family’s scant water supplies while Mr. Abu Naim watches from the ramshackle tents of Al Mughayir, where he lives above the valley.

“I beg you, I beg you. God, just let us be,’” Mr. Abu Naim recalled telling settlers during a recent confrontation. “Just go away. We don’t want any problems.”

Vast stretches of his family’s farm and wheat have been seized by Israeli settlers who have set up outposts, illegal encampments that can eventually grow to become large settlements, on the nearby hills.

New roads cut through the land on which his own flock of sheep graze — and settlers routinely steal the animals, he said. Six months ago, a masked settler armed with a gun broke into his family home at 3 a.m., he recalled. He described raiders tearing through his son’s nearby home at night last December, slashing tents and stealing solar panels.

The family takes turns at night guarding their sheep against attacks from settlers. On a recent day, we found Mr. Abu Naim resting on pillows, a portable radio pressed to his ear listening for regional news.

Go away. Go away from here. Leave, Mr. Abu Naim said the settlers have told him repeatedly.

“I’m 70 years old, and I’ve been here all my life,” he replies. “But you came yesterday, and you want me now to leave, to go home.”

“This is my home.”

The fate of a farmer trying to wrest a livelihood out of a landscape dotted since biblical times by sheep and gnarled olive trees may seem distant from a modern world of clashing superpowers.

But these remote hilltops and hamlets sit at the leading edge of an intractable geopolitical conflict.

Even as the war in Gaza commanded the world’s attention over the past two years, the facts on the ground were shifting in the West Bank, intensifying the battle for control of the lands of Bethlehem and Jericho, Ramallah and Hebron.

For many Palestinians, they are the foundation of a future state of their own — and a future peace. But for many Jews, they are a rightful homeland.

Extremist Jewish settlers and Palestinian farmers are the foot soldiers in this endless conflict, an extension of the war in 1948 that accompanied the establishment of Israel. And since the Oct. 7., 2023, attack on Israel by Palestinian militants from Gaza, Israel’s far-right government has embraced a playbook of expanding settlements across the West Bank, transforming the region, piece by piece, from a patchwork of connected Palestinian villages into a collection of Israeli neighborhoods.

The unrelenting violent campaign by these settlers, that critics say is largely tolerated by the Israeli military, consists of brutal harassment, beatings, even killings, as well as high-impact roadblocks and village closures. These are coupled with a drastic increase in land seizures by the state and the demolition of villages to force Palestinians to abandon their land.

Many of the settlers are young extremists whose views go beyond even the far-right ideology of the government. They are not generally operating on direct orders from Israel’s military leadership. But they know the military frequently looks the other way and facilitates their actions.

In many cases, it is the military that forces Palestinians to evacuate or orders the destruction of their homes once settlers drive them to flee.

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