Pressed for his own opinion, Segal said he was not a spokesman for the government and then gave ground. "My view is that the Gaza Strip could have been open earlier," he said. But he argued it would have made little difference to what he called "the distorted perception according to which Israel can do no right and Hamas can do no wrong."
"There is no such thing as the Ministry of Health in Gaza. It's Hamas," Segal said, adding that journalists in Gaza "all work for Hamas" and comparing the idea of free reporting there to expecting it in North Korea. He said reporters in the Strip had used a WhatsApp group to ask Hamas for permission to publish.
Morgan then turned the question on him, asking what he had reported at IDF Radio and whether he had been critical of the army. "Of course," Segal replied. When Conricus cut in to call the comparison ignorant, Morgan told him to let Segal answer. Segal had a line for both: "Jonathan, you are interrupting me while Piers was busy interrupting me. So please don't take his role."
Anyone familiar with Israel's media landscape, Segal went on, would know that "one of the most critical news outlets towards the government, and especially the Netanyahu government, is the IDF radio station," which he said is why the coalition wanted to legislate against it. "You cannot compare the IDF in a democratic country, the IDF radio, to the fundamentalist, terrorist, lunatic dictatorship of Hamas in the Gaza Strip."
Hasan called Israel an apartheid regime and cited the Israeli outlet +972 on civilian casualties. Segal seized on the citation as proof of his point, saying that in Israel "people can report whatever they want because it's a free country," and that Muslim journalists work freely at his own channel. When Hasan raised the military censor, Segal shot back: "Mehdi, I have a scoop for you. There's a military censor."
Morgan argued that if Gaza's journalists are compromised, that is all the more reason to admit independent ones. "The longer the ban goes on, the more convinced I become that the IDF and the Israeli government have something to hide," he said. Segal answered that an Israel bent on concealment, having cut water and electricity, could simply have shut down the internet in Gaza. He described the genocide charge as referring to "the only genocide in the world's history in which the population grows rather than declines."
The segment ended on the hijacking. Segal accused Hasan of spreading conspiracy theories about it and of failing to condemn it. Asked by Morgan directly whether he condemned the Omani co-pilot's actions, Hasan said every normal human being condemns crimes and asked, "The idea that I should condemn it, why? Because I'm a Muslim?" He added, "I condemn the killing of all civilians."
Segal replied that Hasan had not posted a word about it because it did not fit a worldview in which Israel can do no right and "Muslims can do no wrong."
