The prospect of New York police arresting Benjamin Netanyahu when he arrives for the UN General Assembly is, for now, more political provocation than executable policy. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has acknowledged as much. He says his administration is consulting the city’s Law Department, does not yet know whether he possesses the authority to order such a detention, and will act only within existing law.
The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister in November 2024, finding reasonable grounds to believe he bore criminal responsibility for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including starvation as a method of warfare.
These remain allegations, not convictions. Yet the United States is not a party to the Rome Statute. Federal law sharply restricts cooperation by federal, state and local bodies with the ICC, while a serving head of government is ordinarily treated by Washington as immune from criminal jurisdiction.
A unilateral NYPD operation would therefore collide with federal law, foreign-policy powers and diplomatic obligations surrounding the UN.
But the legal improbability of an arrest does not make Mamdani’s intervention meaningless. It exposes the central weakness of international criminal justice: courts may issue warrants, but enforcement depends upon governments that invoke law selectively.
Washington supports accountability when the accused belongs to a rival state, yet condemns the same machinery when it reaches an ally. The Trump administration has gone further, sanctioning ICC judges, prosecutors and rights advocates while pressing other states to weaken the court.
Its sovereignty objection can be argued in court; punishing jurists for exercising an internationally conferred mandate is something else.
The ICC must, of course, earn rather than demand confidence. Its procedures must remain rigorous, its evidence tested and its scrutiny applied equally to crimes attributed to Israeli forces and Hamas. October 7 cannot provide an indefinite licence for collective punishment, starvation or attacks on civilians. Mamdani is therefore right to seek a definitive legal opinion, even if that opinion concludes that City Hall cannot act. The point is not to stage an unlawful arrest for applause. It is to reject the presumption that allied leaders are automatically beyond legal examination. *