UN envoy urges Israel to surrender Netanyahu and Gallant to ICC

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, News.az reports citing The Times of Israel.

“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.

News.Az