Zohran Mamdani doubles down on support for ICC, calls for Netanyahu’s arrest if he visits NYC

Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor, doubled down on his support for the international criminal court (ICC) on Wednesday and called on federal authorities to execute the court’s warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrest should he visit the city in the fall.

“I call on the federal government to join the international criminal court and to execute both this warrant as well as any warrant the international criminal court holds,” Mamdani told reporters at a press conference on Wednesday.

Those remarks came less than 24 hours after Mamdani called the Israeli prime minister a “war criminal” who is “not welcome in New York City” in a video statement posted on social media. In the statement, the mayor acknowledged he had no legal authority to direct New York police to arrest Netanyahu should he attend the United Nations general assembly in September.

Mamdani had previously said he was “in conversation” with city lawyers to determine whether his administration could arrest Netanyahu, as he had pledged to do during his mayoral campaign last year.

On Wednesday, Mamdani rejected arguments from critics that Israel’s war crimes in Gaza have nothing to do with New York City. Israel’s actions in Gaza, he said, had “offended the conscience, the morals, the mere humanity of so many New Yorkers”.

Mamdani’s statements about Netanyahu were remarkable for a US municipal leader and a signal of how support for Palestinian rights remains a signature policy for him.

His insistence that the US government arrest Netanyahu has been met with condemnation and ridicule from pro-Israel officials. Pro-Palestinian advocates’ reactions were more mixed – some praised the mayor’s Tuesday statement for its “moral clarity” while others expressed disappointment that he walked back on his promise to seek the Israeli leader’s arrest.

“I think the mayor should stay in his lane,” Jonathan Harounoff, Israel’s former international spokesperson at the United Nations, told NY1, accusing him of “political theater”.

John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, one of the most staunchly pro-Israel Democrats in the Senate, called Mamdani a “clown” who should “sit down”.

“America’s not even part of that corrupt court,” Fetterman said in an interview with Fox News over the weekend. “That’s really not your purview.”

Simcha Eichenstein, a pro-Israel New York state assemblymember, had previously called on the state attorney general to review whether Mamdani’s comments about Netanyahu violated state law.

The ICC issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu and the former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant in 2024, accusing them of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including “starvation as a method of warfare, and … murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts”.

“I believe Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague,” Mamdani told the New York Times last week, referring to the city in the Netherlands that is home to the court.

Neither the US nor Israel are members of the ICC, which the US government has long opposed and which Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, this month threatened to “dismantle” by pressing other countries to abandon it.

Mamdani said he concluded his administration had no authority to execute the ICC arrest warrant, but shifted the burden on the Trump administration to do so.

“It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant,” he said in Tuesday’s statement. “The federal government, however, does – and I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant.”

Donald Trump has already said he will do no such thing.

Netanyahu “will not be arrested” on US soil, the president said in a social media post earlier this week, adding that the Israeli prime minister was “fighting against the Islamic Republic of Iran” and “the only ones that should be arrested are the people that led Iran into this unprecedented spiral of death and destruction”.

Netanyahu had said in the past he was “not concerned” with Mamdani’s threat, and his office said in a statement last week that the mayor “appears interested in diverting public attention from his follies and attacking the leader of the Jewish state and the only democracy in the Middle East”. It called the ICC a “kangaroo court”.

Supporters of the court have also praised Mamdani’s efforts to stand up for the tribunal’s mission.