New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani renewed his description of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal a day after meeting President Trump at Gracie Mansion. Asked about Netanyahu on CNN, Mamdani said he has described him as I believe him to be, a war criminal and an architect of a horrific genocide, and said International Criminal Court arrest warrants against him should be honored.
The remark came directly after a meeting Mamdani described as cordial, and he said he raised the question of international legal accountability with Trump during it. The sequence puts a New York mayor stating that a sitting Israeli prime minister should be arrested under ICC warrants in the same 24 hours as a friendly sit down with the American president, two positions Mamdani is not treating as in tension with each other.
Mamdani had previously vowed to arrest Netanyahu were he to set foot in New York for a UN visit, before acknowledging that as mayor he does not actually have the legal authority to do so. The CNN comments repeat the underlying position without repeating the specific vow, a step back from the enforcement claim while holding the same language about Netanyahu himself.
The remarks land the same week Iran's president is arriving in New York for the UN General Assembly, and G7 foreign ministers are separately urging Iran to stop arming the Houthis after their attacks on Saudi Arabia. Mamdani's comments are a domestic New York story with an international audience: the mayor of the city hosting the UN session is entering it having called one of the region's central figures a war criminal on cable news.