New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani acknowledged Tuesday that he has no legal authority to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, backing away from a pledge he had repeated for more than a year, while the Trump administration separately announced a sweeping campaign to dismantle the International Criminal Court itself.
Mamdani first vowed during his mayoral campaign to direct the NYPD to enforce the ICC’s 2024 arrest warrant against Netanyahu if the Israeli leader set foot in New York, despite legal experts warning at the time that he had no authority to do so. The pledge resurfaced this month when The New York Times asked Mamdani whether he still intended to act on it ahead of Netanyahu’s expected trip to New York in September for the UN General Assembly. Mamdani told the Times he was in “an active conversation with our legal department” and would “follow the laws that we have here in New York City.”
On Tuesday, Mamdani settled the question in a video posted to his office’s YouTube channel. “Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal, the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people,” Mamdani said, repeating an accusation neither he nor the ICC has proven in any court, and accusing Netanyahu of responsibility for the deaths of more than 73,000 people and the wounding of tens of thousands of children. “My administration has reviewed every avenue available under applicable law to determine whether New York City could execute the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant,” he said. “It is clear we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant.”
Mamdani then called on the federal government to act instead. “The federal government, however, does [have that authority], and I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant,” he said, adding, “Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large.”
Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, dismissed the episode as political theater. “Enough with the blood libels,” Danon said in response to the video. “You were elected to serve New Yorkers, not Hamas’s propaganda. Do your job.” In earlier remarks to NewsNation, Danon called Mamdani’s threat “a stunt” meant to “distract the conversation from his failures in running the city and putting the blame on Israel,” noting that the United States is not a party to the ICC and that no arrest warrant carries any force within US borders.
Netanyahu’s office was similarly dismissive, calling the ICC “a kangaroo court that has no jurisdiction over Americans or Israelis” and noting that the warrant against Netanyahu was issued by Karim Khan, the court’s chief prosecutor, shortly before allegations of sexual misconduct against Khan became public; Khan was later suspended, with a vote by ICC member states on his dismissal expected this week. The office accused Mamdani of “attacking the leader of the Jewish state and the only democracy in the Middle East” to distract from his own record running the city.
President Trump also weighed in, writing on Truth Social that Netanyahu “will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America,” and describing him as fighting “against the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, a Democrat, called Mamdani “a clown” for the threat, telling Fox News, “America’s not even part of that corrupt court” and that arresting a foreign leader “is really not your purview.”
The legal obstacles to Mamdani’s original pledge were substantial from the start. The ICC has no independent enforcement power and depends on member states to carry out its arrest warrants; neither the United States nor Israel belongs to the court, so it has no jurisdiction on US soil. The 2002 American Servicemembers’ Protection Act bars local governments from cooperating with the ICC, and separate federal law criminalizes the imprisonment or harassment of foreign officials, including visiting heads of state, a category that also carries diplomatic immunity from ordinary prosecution. Any extradition to The Hague would in any case require action by federal authorities such as the Department of Justice or the US Marshals, not the mayor’s office. Governor Kathy Hochul had already told Mamdani a year earlier that the mayor “does not have the power to do that.”
Washington Moves Against the Court Itself
The Mamdani episode played out against the backdrop of a far larger fight: a campaign Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced this month to dismantle the ICC’s ability to operate at all. In a July 14 op-ed, Rubio argued that the court has moved far beyond the narrow mandate it was founded on, now claiming “near-unlimited reach” to prosecute American soldiers, law enforcement officers, and elected officials under laws the United States never agreed to.
Rubio traced the fight back to 2020, when then-chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda opened an investigation into alleged war crimes by US forces in Afghanistan, and warned that the same dynamic now threatens Border Patrol agents, Marines, and federal prosecutors carrying out US policy. “The ICC’s interfering with American military and law enforcement operations isn’t only a grave overreach of its purported authorities,” Rubio wrote. “It would mean the death of the U.S. as a sovereign and independent nation.”
The State Department’s campaign, announced alongside the op-ed, calls for a “whole-of-government response” to the court, including diplomatic pressure on allied nations to withdraw from the ICC or reject its authority over American personnel, increased sanctions on the court and affiliated organizations, and visa revocations and travel bans for ICC staff. The administration had already sanctioned the court in February over its warrants against Netanyahu and former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant, and Rubio said Washington would work to “dismantle the ICC — brick by brick, if necessary.”
