Zohran Mamdani says as mayor he would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he traveled to New York

If he wins his fall election, Zohran Mamdani would order New York’s police department to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu in the event that the Israeli prime minister ever traveled there, the city’s leading mayoral candidate said in a recent interview.

Mamdani – the Democratic nominee in the 4 November election – alleged to the New York Times on Thursday that Netanyahu was a war criminal who was committing genocide with Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, according to a report published by the outlet on Friday. He said he would honor an international criminal court (ICC) arrest warrant issued in November 2024 for Netanyahu’s arrest over alleged Gaza war crimes by having the Israeli leader taken into custody at the airport if he ever steps foot in New York and Mamdani is the mayor.

“This is something that I intend to fulfill,” Mamdani remarked, reiterating a pledge he had made earlier in the mayoral race, as the Times put it. “It is my desire to ensure that this be a city that stands up for international law.”

In New York, the city’s police commissioner serves as the pleasure of its mayor. But the Times’ report cited legal experts who judged that having Netanyahu arrested “would be a practical impossibility” for Mamdani and could bring him into direct conflict with the federal government.

The US does not recognize the ICC’s authority and is not a party to the body, whose headquarters are at The Hague in the Netherlands. In February, Donald Trump ordered economic sanctions against the ICC, with the president maintaining that the court lacked jurisdiction over the US or Israel.

Netanyahu, for his part, said in July at a meeting alongside Trump that he was “not concerned” about Mamdani’s wishes to have him arrested. He suggested he would travel with Trump and then “we’ll see” if he was arrested.

As the Times noted, Trump at the time added that Mamdani “better behave – otherwise, he’s going to have big problems”.

The Times alluded to polling which showed that New Yorkers now generally express support for Palestinians over Israel in the latter’s war with Hamas. Nonetheless, the outlet said it anticipated Mamdani’s comments would provoke strong reactions in the city, which is the world’s second-largest home to Jews behind only the Israeli capital, Tel Aviv.

A poll released on Wednesday showed Mamdani, a democratic socialist state assemblyman, led former New York governor Andrew Cuomo by a dominant 15 percentage points with less than two months to go in the race to take charge of one of the world’s most prominent cities.

Cuomo is running as an independent after losing June’s Democratic primary to Mamdani. Behind both Mamdani and Cuomo in the survey from Emerson College Polling, PIX11 and the Hill were Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa and incumbent mayor Eric Adams, who is also running as an independent.

Recent reports say advisers to Trump – a Republican and New York native – have sought to set up a two-candidate race between Mamdani and Cuomo, possibly by arranging potential presidential administration roles for Adams and Sliwa.

A Times/Siena University poll estimated Mamdani’s lead over Cuomo would shrink to four percentage points if Adams and Sliwa dropped out of the mayoral contest.

Adams and Sliwa, though, have both said they do not intend to abandon the race.