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 – said to the New York Times on Thursday that Netanyahu was a war criminal who was committing genocide with Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Mamdani said he would honor an international criminal court (ICC) arrest warrant issued in November last year for Netanyahu’s arrest over alleged Gaza war crimes by having the Israeli PM taken into custody at the airport if he ever steps foot in New York.
“This is something that I intend to fulfill,” Mamdani remarked, reiterating a pledge he had made earlier in the mayoral race, as the newspaper 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 at the pleasure of its mayor. But the New York 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 it. In February, Donald Trump ordered economic sanctions against the court, with the president maintaining that the court lacked jurisdiction over the US or Israel.
Netanyahu 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.
Trump at the time added that Mamdani “better behave – otherwise, he’s going to have big problems”.
The New York Times alluded to polling which showed that New Yorkers 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 city of 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.
Cuomo is running as an independent Behind Mamdani and Cuomo in the survey from Emerson College Polling, Pix 11 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.
Adams and Sliwa have both said they do not intend to abandon the race.
• This article was amended on 14 September 2025. An earlier version incorrectly stated that Tel Aviv was Israel’s capital city.
