NEW YORK – Benjamin Netanyahu declared on Monday that he would travel to New York City in September to address the United Nations General Assembly, brushing aside an ICC arrest warrant for war crimes in Gaza and ignoring the city’s mayor, who had called him a war criminal to his face. The Israeli prime minister, wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes committed in the course of a genocide the entire world has been watching for two years, said the trip was happening regardless.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who took office in January, did not soften his language when addressing the visit. Netanyahu had orchestrated “a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people,” Mamdani said in a video statement, and was “a war criminal.” He called on the federal government to honor the 2024 ICC arrest warrant that remains outstanding against Netanyahu for the mass killing in Gaza. That warrant, issued by the court in The Hague, covers charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in the course of the Israeli campaign that has killed more than forty thousand Palestinians.
The mayor acknowledged he had no authority to enforce the warrant himself. New York City does not have the legal mechanism, and even if it did, the federal government would have to act. That is precisely what Mamdani was asking for, and what he knows he will not get. President Trump has pledged that Netanyahu “will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form” while he is in the United States. Trump is not enforcing the ICC warrant against any Israeli official. He is, in effect, personally guaranteeing Netanyahu’s impunity on American soil.
Netanyahu responded to the mayor in the way he responds to all accountability: by calling it hate. Mamdani was “fomenting hate,” Netanyahu told Fox News, “pitting one group of New Yorkers against the other.” The framing is familiar. When international courts issue warrants, Netanyahu calls them antisemitic. When a mayor of a city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel calls for accountability for a genocide, Netanyahu calls it hate. The pattern holds: any demand for accountability becomes, in Netanyahu’s telling, an attack on Jewish people.
A YouGov poll conducted ahead of Netanyahu’s announcement showed that nearly half of Americans believe he has committed war crimes in Gaza. That number is not a fringe position. It is a polling result that puts roughly half the American public in agreement with the International Criminal Court, with the mayor of New York, and with the overwhelming majority of international human rights organizations that have documented what has happened in Gaza since October 2023.
The killing in Gaza has not stopped. The genocide continues. And into that context, Netanyahu is planning a visit to address the United Nations General Assembly, the body whose resolutions Israel has violated for decades, in the city whose mayor has told him plainly what he is. Trump’s earlier guarantee of safe passage was made before Mamdani’s direct challenge. Now both are on the record, one protecting the prime minister, one demanding his arrest.
Political scientist Jacob Neiheisel characterized Mamdani’s stance as “posturing” for supporters on an issue unlikely to produce action. That reading is accurate as a description of the immediate political dynamic. It is not accurate as a description of what Mamdani did. He used the platform of the mayor’s office to say, in clear language, that the head of a foreign government who is visiting his city is a war criminal under international law. That is not posturing. That is a political leader choosing accuracy over diplomatic protocol.
Netanyahu’s trip is expected in September, when world leaders gather for the annual opening of the General Assembly. He has addressed the UN General Assembly many times before, most memorably with a cartoon bomb prop and a sequence of speeches that grew progressively more disconnected from diplomatic reality. His September 2026 address will be his first since the ICC issued its warrant, and his first since the genocide in Gaza consumed more than two years of world attention and tens of thousands of Palestinian lives.
The legal position is that the United States is not a party to the Rome Statute, which means it has no treaty obligation to enforce ICC warrants. That is the technical argument Netanyahu’s supporters will make. The political reality is that the United States actively pressures other countries to comply with international law when it suits American interests, and declines to do so when it does not. The ICC warrant for Netanyahu tests the coherence of that position in real time, on American soil, with a hundred and ninety-three countries watching.
Mamdani is not wrong about what Netanyahu is. He is not wrong about what the ICC determined. He is not wrong about what has happened in Gaza. What he cannot do, from the mayor’s office of one American city, is compel a federal government that has decided protection of Netanyahu is a diplomatic priority to change course. That gap between what is true and what can be enforced is not Mamdani’s failure. It is a description of the limits of accountability in a world where the most powerful government on earth chooses impunity over law.
Netanyahu has called the ICC warrant “bogus” and described its chief prosecutor as “corrupt and evil.” Those are the words of a man who knows the court got it right. The warrant is not bogus. The genocide is documented. The visits to New York for UNGA are a tradition Netanyahu intends to continue, ICC warrant or not, mayor’s objections or not, American polling or not. The question is not whether he will go. The question is whether anyone will stop him.
