This is the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution.

I'm your host Tom Church and I'm joined by the Libertarian Professor Richard Epstein.

Here at Hoover, Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford senior fellow.

He's also the Lawrence A. Tish Professor of Law at NYU, and he's a senior lecture at the University

of Chicago.

Richard, we're just over a month out from the attacks on Israel from Hamas with Israel going into Gaza, cutting

off Gaza city, conducting not just airstrikes, but ground operations.

They are, I think the recent news today

is that we've got humanitarian pauses

in the fighting in the be done quite soon. And I believe today as well, President Biden was asked about the likelihood of a ceasefire and his answer was none, not going to happen. And I think, you know, we've talked on this program why that why that seems to make sense because Israel

isn't going to stop until Hamas is rooted out done and no longer able to conduct any operations.

So there's a lot to talk about here obviously. the I've got a law professor here. I kind of want to step back for a moment because again I'm reading commentary I can't look away from this and there are still just constant

complaints or allegations against Israel for conducting either war crimes or the way that it's

prosecuting this war, mainly because the number of people that Israel is killed is significantly more than what Hamas was able to or is still continually able to do.

So I guess I want to start Richard by talking about how Israel is prosecuting this war and what it actually means for a country or a I guess in Hamas a case, a terrorist organization within a territory

to actually conduct war crime.

What makes something a war crime?

What makes something a crime against humanity and I suppose why aren't we hearing more about allegations of Hamas doing the same thing?

Well, I mean that's one of the most troublesome things. I mean there was a recent announcement by one of the

major leaders for Masu said we conducted this mass assault on Israel on October 7th

because we wanted the world to pay attention to the fact that the Palestinian problem had been put into the rear view mirror.

And the reason why that was the case, the Abraham Accords and most of the other initiatives,

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