WASHINGTON — Three times in seven months, Benjamin Netanyahu has crossed Canadian airspace aboard the Wing of Zion. Three times, Canada has said nothing.
Netanyahu was en route to Washington on Monday aboard the aircraft, a Boeing 767 that cost $119.64 million to establish with roughly $19.67 million in annual operating costs. His seventh visit to meet with President Donald Trump in two years began with the jet clearing maritime airspace above Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. By Tuesday afternoon, he was in a pew at Senator Lindsey Graham’s funeral at Washington National Cathedral.
None of that is legally uncomplicated. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu on November 21, 2024, charging him with murder, persecution, and using starvation as a method of warfare in Gaza. Canada is a signatory to the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the court and requires member states to arrest and surrender persons subject to its warrants. Greece, Italy, and France, whose airspace the Wing of Zion also crossed on the outbound leg, are signatories too.
Israel told CBC News it had asked Canada for permission to use the airspace. Ottawa declined to say whether it granted the request, how the question was handled legally, or whether any formal review preceded the decision. Prime Minister Mark Carney, who previously said his government would arrest Netanyahu if he entered Canadian territory, has not addressed how that statement applies to overflights.
The legal argument for inaction turns on an ambiguity the Rome Statute’s drafters did not anticipate. The treaty’s arrest obligations, under Article 89, were written with ground-based scenarios in mind. Neither the ICC nor its member states have formally adjudicated whether an aircraft transiting a signatory’s airspace creates the same obligation as a person crossing a land border. The Chicago Convention, which governs international civil aviation, separately requires state aircraft to obtain permission to fly through another country’s territory. The Wing of Zion is an official state aircraft. Whether such permission was sought from Greece, Italy, and France for the western legs of the journey is not publicly known.
Matt Kennard, whose flight-tracking work helped surface the route, said the four countries were acting “in breach of their obligation to cooperate with the ICC,” Middle East Eye reported. Under Article 86 of the Rome Statute, member states are required to “cooperate fully” with the court’s investigations and prosecutions. What that cooperation looks like when the wanted person is airborne above your territory has not been tested in any tribunal.
Washington received Netanyahu regardless. He entered the White House through a side entrance and had no public appearance with Trump, a departure from the high-profile receptions of earlier visits attributed partly to growing private friction over Netanyahu’s continued military operations in Lebanon and Gaza. The agenda included Iran’s nuclear trajectory, Israeli domestic politics ahead of October elections, and Netanyahu’s opposition to a proposed U.S. sale of F-35 aircraft to Turkey. Neither leader addressed the ICC warrant or the airspace question in public remarks.
Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said Netanyahu “should be nowhere close to the Oval Office.” The comment, made without accompanying legislation, reflected the political ceiling on Democratic pressure over the warrant. The Trump administration has given no indication it views the ICC warrant as a constraint on Israeli officials’ access to Washington. Those two facts form the backdrop against which the court’s enforcement framework is being tested in real time.
The Wing of Zion has spent much of the past year navigating this legal terrain operationally. Establishing the aircraft cost $119.64 million; its annual operating costs run to roughly $19.67 million. It has been used less frequently than planned, in part because the ICC warrant complicates almost every European routing and requires diplomatic calculation before each departure. The outbound leg to Washington traversed the full risk exposure. The return, per the Times of Israel, did not.
The return journey is the more revealing detail. Netanyahu’s route home avoided Canadian airspace entirely, rerouting in a way that added time and distance to the flight. The detour suggests that whoever planned the itinerary calculated a second Canadian transit carried legal exposure not worth repeating.
December, February, July. The pattern spans three seasons and three transits of airspace belonging to states that have committed, on paper, to enforce the ICC’s orders. An Economist/YouGov poll from May found that 49 percent of Americans favored arresting Netanyahu if he arrived on U.S. soil, a figure that rose to 74 percent among those who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 and fell to 23 percent among those who voted for Trump. The warrant has been absorbed into partisan identity, converted from a legal question into a political one.
The question that Canada, France, Greece, and Italy have not answered publicly is whether their Rome Statute commitments have practical meaning, or whether Netanyahu’s flight path has already provided the answer for them.
