New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) is openly weighing whether he can order the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if the Israeli leader sets foot in the city for the United Nations General Assembly this September.
According to The New York Times, Mamdani told interviewer Lulu Garcia-Navarro that Netanyahu belongs in prison for alleged war crimes and that he is in active conversation with the New York City Law Department about his legal authority. Hes a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court, the mayor said, adding, And what you will find is that is an opinion that is held by many, purely because of what his actions have wrought over these last many years.
The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu in 2024 over Israels military operations in Gaza, a move many conservatives view as a politicized attack on a key U.S. ally rather than a neutral application of international law. Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist, has made his hostility to Israel a feature of his mayoral campaign, repeatedly raising the prospect of detaining the Israeli leader.
Whatever the law allows me to do in New York City, thats what we will do, but we wont be writing our own laws to that end, Mamdani said, suggesting he is prepared to push the limits of his office so long as left-wing legal advisers give him cover. Such rhetoric underscores how far some progressive Democrats are willing to go to target a democratically elected ally while violent criminals continue to plague New Yorks streets.
Netanyahu, for his part, has dismissed the mayors threats as unserious and ideologically driven. He argued that the Democratic Socialist hates America and previously brushed off the arrest talk as silly.
Hes condemning Israel, the one democracy that stands shoulder to shoulder with American values, the prime minister told radio host Sid Rosenberg, defending Israels role as a strategic partner of the United States. Netanyahu further accused Mamdani of siding with Hamas, noting the terror groups Oct. 7, 2023 massacre that triggered the Gaza war: Who does he champion? Hamas, that calls openly to massacre every Jew on earth, that conducted that horrible massacre, the worst massacre on Jews since the Holocaust, he said, highlighting the moral stakes as radicals in American politics flirt with criminalizing an allied leader rather than confronting Islamist terrorism.
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