The UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese called on Israeli authorities to hand Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant over to the International Criminal Court, speaking in an interview with Piers Morgan on Tuesday after the court issued arrest warrants for them last week.

“If they had nothing to fear they would stand justice. They would defend themselves in front of the ICC. What do they have to fear if they did nothing wrong?” she said in the interview for Piers Morgan Uncensored on YouTube, which was followed by a panel of four Jewish personalities who discussed the issues she touched on.

Albanese added Israel had the right to take action against Hamas terrorists on Israeli territory on October 7, 2023, including “using force, arresting, lethal force, and all methods involved,” but she said that Israel’s subsequent attacks on Hamas in Gaza were illegal.

After Hamas’s shock October 7 attack, in which terrorists murdered some 1,200 people and took 251 hostages, accompanied by brutal assaults including sexual violence, Israel began carrying out airstrikes on the terrorist organization and launched a ground invasion later the same month with the objectives of dismantling the terror group, which rules Gaza, and retrieving the hostages.

Albanese told Morgan that she believed the ICC’s case against Netanyahu and Gallant was too narrow and should include Israel’s entire offensive against Hamas beyond its borders, as it “didn’t have the right to wage a war against the Palestinians in Gaza.”

She reluctantly conceded that Hamas’s attack was terrorism but said that “the fact that we call it terrorism doesn’t justify what Israel has done since.”

Israel’s declaration of war and ground invasion was an “eye for an eye argument” that she claimed could be used “to justify October 7” as well, adding that “waging a war was not proportionate” in response to the Hamas massacre — the most deadly attack on Jews since the Holocaust.

Arguing for Israel on the panel were American lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who urged Morgan to give him an equal half hour to Albanese’s interview, and former IDF spokesperson Jonathan Conricus.

On the anti-Israel side were British journalist and author Matt Kennard and Katie Halper, host of the podcast A Jew For Ceasefire Now.

Albanese, who has been accused of antisemitism in the past, called the ICC warrants “necessary” and “long due” and said they were “very meaningful” despite the fact that Israel and the US don’t recognize the ICC’s authority on the matter.

“The evidence is overwhelming that starvation has been used as a tool of war and it cannot be justified by any possible circumstance,” Albanese told Morgan.

Dershowitz said the arrest warrants, while they would stop Netanyahu from traveling to other countries to “make the case for Israel,” were detrimental to the ICC as well because they improperly issued. The court’s top prosecutor, Karim Khan, he said, “was supposed to go to Israel to look at both sides of the issue but after he was accused of sexual harassment, he canceled that trip because he wanted to issue the arrest warrants very quickly.”

Conricus echoed the sentiment, calling Khan “suspicious and controversial” and saying the process had been “totally flawed.”

“All the information has been based on false or incomplete information. I think there is proof verified by non-Israeli sources that contradicts all the allegations,” he said, although he did not name any specific sources.

Morgan, a notably pro-Israel British journalist and media personality, argued that the IDF’s refusal to allow foreign journalists into Gaza to report on what was happening in the Strip prevented such evidence from coming to light and raised suspicion against Israel.

While all four panelists agreed that foreign journalists should be allowed into Gaza, Kennard — who called Israel a “rogue terrorist regime” but refused to apply the epithet to Hamas or label its October 7 attack last year as terrorism — accused Israel of deliberately targeting Palestinian media officials to stop them from reporting on its alleged crimes against humanity, a claim that has never been proven and that Israel categorically denies.

Meanwhile, Conricus said the real obstacle to reliable reporting from within Gaza was Hamas, which he accused of controlling Palestinian media in the enclave.

“I’ve seen it happen in real-time. Instead of doing their job of reporting on Hamas’s war crimes, it’s been documented but not reported because Hamas won’t let them and it’s been stifling them,” he said.

Last month, Israel published documents that it said provided evidence that journalists killed by the IDF were active members of Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an allegation is has made repeatedly over the last 13 months of the war.

Many of the specific journalists named were employees of Qatar-based Al-Jazeera, which Israel’s government took off the air and blocked in April.

In June, a court found a direct and causal connection between individuals who have carried out terror attacks inside Israel and the consumption of Al Jazeera content. It also determined that there was a “close connection” between Al Jazeera and Hamas, that some Al Jazeera reporters in Gaza had turned themselves into “assistants and partners” with Hamas, and that some of them had even carried out terror attacks.

Meanwhile, addressing comments she made last month urging the UN to consider suspending Israel as a member state, Albanese accused Israel of violating international law and insulting UN officials and organizations more than any other country in the world.

Among Israel’s alleged crimes was killing 240 UN staff members and firing at UN peacekeepers in Lebanon, Albanese said.

Israel has also alleged that more than 10 percent of the staff of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, in Gaza have ties to terrorist factions and that educational facilities under the organization’s auspices consistently incite hatred of Israel and glorify terror.

In February, the IDF revealed the existence of a subterranean Hamas data center directly beneath UNRWA’s Gaza Strip headquarters. The IDF has also repeatedly targeted Hamas command centers and gunmen hiding out in UNRWA schools.

Israel has been accused of genocide numerous times, most notably in an ongoing case brought by South Africa at the International Court of Justice. The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 42,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 18,000 combatants in battle and another 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.

Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.

During the interview, Albanese said that Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which she called colonies, were also war crimes, declaring that “Israel needs to withdraw the occupation because it has given the chance for violence to fester.”

She also criticized outgoing US President Joe Biden’s administration, saying the US had supplied Israel with more military, economic, financial, and political aid in the last 14 months than it ever has.

“I understand, as a European, why Jewish people have such a deep connection to Israel, but what I do question is third state responsibility. How member states act vis-a-vis a state this is committing genocide which it has been committing for 50 years and unlawful occupation and unlawful apartheid,” she said.

Albanese concluded that she hoped incoming US president Trump would “step away from this precipice and do the right thing.”

Dershowitz, by contrast, was bullish on Trump’s reelection, saying he would be “tough on Iran” — the backer of terror groups including Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah — which would likely lead to peace.

“If Iran is disarmed we will see real peace in the region,” he said.

Kennard, however, called Trump a “disaster for the Palestinian cause” because he “has Israel’s interests at heart.”

During Trump’s first term in the White House, he was accused by Palestinians and their supporters of heavily skewing support in favor of Israel after he moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem and presented a peace plan that would have seen Israel annexing all of its West Bank settlements, though it did call for a Palestinian state as well.