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Mamdani weighs arrest
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he is consulting with city authorities over whether he could arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if Netanyahu visits New York for the United Nations General Assembly in September.
Mamdani told The New York Times, “I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in the Hague,” adding, “He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court.”
He said his office is in “active conversation” with the city’s law department about whether he has the authority to have Netanyahu arrested, and that “Whatever the law allows me to do in New York City, that’s what we will do.”
The ICC is described in the reporting as having issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for possible crimes against humanity in Gaza, and Mamdani’s remarks prompted a reaction from Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, who insisted Netanyahu will attend the UNGA meeting in New York this September.
Netanyahu and Danon push back
Netanyahu responded to Mamdani’s arrest talk, telling radio personality Sid Rosenberg that he thinks Mamdani secretly “hates America.”
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, framed the mayor’s comments as an attempt to “stoke hostility and make headlines by attacking the State of Israel,” and said Netanyahu “will come to New York, address the United Nations General Assembly with pride.”
Mamdani’s position was also met with legal cautions, with CNN Arabic reporting that the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz described the remarks as a “purely political theater” and noted that the United States is not a member of the ICC.
In a separate response, Euronews reported that Israel’s Consul General in New York, Ofer Akunis, said Mamdani “has no authority” to issue an order to arrest Netanyahu.
Legal and political stakes
The reporting ties Mamdani’s pledge to the ICC’s warrant and to the legal constraints of enforcing it in the United States, where the U.S. has not ratified the Rome Statute that obliges countries to arrest people subject to ICC warrants.
CNN Arabic reported that the U.S. ambassador Mike Waltz said the “U.S. is not a member of the ICC,” while Newsweek similarly described Waltz’s argument that the U.S. never ratified the Rome Statute and that UN Headquarters Agreement protections and head-of-state immunity would complicate any attempt to arrest Netanyahu.
The Hill reported that Sen. John Fetterman told Mamdani to “sit down,” arguing that “America’s not even part of that corrupt court” and that the mayor should focus on “the problems that they have in New York.”
Meanwhile, the dispute is set against a wider political backdrop in the sources, including a May poll finding nearly three-quarters of Democratic voters oppose US aid to Israel, and a note that nearly half of Democratic members of the US House of Representatives voted to end US aid to Israel earlier this week.
