And the F.F.N. Hello and welcome to Navara FM. I'm Eleanor Penny.

As I'm speaking to you now, it is the afternoon of the 13th of February 2024.

Israel is currently, as we speak, launching a deadly campaign of bombardment on the 1.7 million Palestinian refugees crammed into rougher.

This area had previously been declared a safe zone, and many people fled there as the vast majority

of residential homes throughout Gaza were flattened.

Palestinians already facing disease and starvation are now trying to survive the hell of renewed Israeli

aggression and even Joe Biden is making gestures towards the idea that some

restraint on the part of Israel might be warranted.

So inevitably, there is a lot of discussion about whether or not Israel's campaign of

violence against Gaza constitutes war crimes, whether or

a genocide is currently underway.

It's a debate that has recently made its way to the ICJ or international courts of justice,

which saw South Africa bring a case against Israel.

In a somewhat ambivalent ruling the court

found that there was a plausible possibility of a genocide occurring and that

Israel should undertake steps to prevent it, but it stopped short of ruling that Israel should withdraw any military

operation entirely.

Against this backdrop, I sat down with legal scholar Robert Knox to talk about how international

law works. Its historic entanglement with capitalism and

colonialism, and whether or not it can be a force for good in liberation struggles.

Robert Knox is a senior lecturer in the law department at Liverpool

University. We talked about Palestinian sovereignty, the justification of

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