https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taXIbXYt6YY
The Israel Lobby with John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt | Outside the Box Podcast Apr 18, 2024

20:12 Let's be clear, what Hamas did is in my view a war crime, attacking innocent civilians but that's not the where this history started. This history started well before that and if you just read the Israeli accounts of this they would like to start the clock on October 7th and deal with those events without talking about the more fundamental political problems that lie beneath it.
Whenever you get into discussions about what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians after October 7th Israel and its supporters try to bring you back to October 7th.

So from Israel's point of view and its defenders point of view the name of the game is to focus exclusively on what happened on October 7th and furthermore to make all sorts of charges against Hamas that make it look like they are extreme barbarians. And this is not to say that the Hamas did not commit what we would call war crimes on October 7th. I'm not denying that but the number of charges that have been made against Hamas for what it did on October 7th that are not correct or quite significant and this involves the rape charge, the beheading of baby, the argument that women had babies cut out of their womb and so forth and so on.

Further it's important to understand that a good number a good number of the Israelis who were killed on October 7th were killed by Israelis because the Israelis invoked the Hannibal Doctrine on October 7th and the Hannibal Doctrine says that from Israel's point of view it is unacceptable for Hamas or the Palestinians to capture Israelis and hold them as hostage and in those instances it makes more sense to kill the Israelis who are possible hostages rather than allow Hamas to take them back into Gaza. So the Israelis actually killed a good number of Israel citizens on October 7th. We don't know what the number is and I'm not implying that the majority of Israelis who were killed that day were killed by the IDF. There is nevertheless evidence that the IDF did kill a good number of Israelis.

We'd like to know what that number is. We'd like to have some sort of systematic analysis of who was raped and whether or not there was a campaign of rape on the part of Hamas.

But Israel up to now has had a vested interest in making the argument that the Palestinians alone killed huge numbers of civilians and they committed crimes like beheading babies, beheading women and so forth and so on that really don't bear up if you look at what's being said in the alternative media media.
At least a third of the Israelis who were killed in the Hamas attack were IDF soldiers or security personnel, not exactly civilians.

If you look at international law there's no question that the Palestinians have a right to resist. And resistance involves killing military personnel on the other side, killing the occupiers so you I don't think you can make the argument that what Hamas did in terms of killing Israeli military personnel violates international law. I think it does not but there's no question that killing innocent civilians is a violation of international law.
But there's also no question that Palestinian according to international law have a right to resist the occupation.