The International Criminal Court’s warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not be executed by municipal authorities in New York, the city’s mayor said this week, closing off a course of action he had promoted since his campaign.
“It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant,” Zohran Mamdani said in a video posted to X on the evening of July 21, 2026. He said his office had gone through “every avenue available under applicable law” before reaching that conclusion.
The mayor redirected the demand upward rather than dropping it. “The federal government however does and I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant,” he said. Washington has never joined the court and does not accept its jurisdiction.
That appeal has already been answered. Trump wrote in a social media post on Monday that the Israeli leader “will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States.”
Netanyahu’s own characterization of the case is that it is illegitimate at the source. A statement from his office argued that “Its bogus arrest warrant against Prime Minister Netanyahu was issued by a disgraced former ICC Prosecutor, Karim Khan, a few days before allegations of sexual misconduct against him became public.” Israel disputes the tribunal’s authority over its officials and rejects the war crimes allegations outright.
Mamdani drew a line between what the city can do legally and how it regards the visit. “I want to be equally clear, Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large,” he said.
The question is not academic. Netanyahu customarily travels to Manhattan each September for the United Nations General Assembly, and Mamdani had earlier told The New York Times he was in “active conversation” with the city’s Law Department about whether he held the authority to make an arrest during that visit.
The warrant itself dates to November 2024. Judges found reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu bears responsibility “for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population” in Gaza. The same set of warrants named former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and the underlying investigation covered both the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack and Israel’s military campaign that followed.
