New York eyes Netanyahu arrest over Gaza starvation
New York is weighing an ICC arrest of Netanyahu as Gaza's starvation toll grows, while Britain won't say if it would do the same.
Sixty-three people died of malnutrition in Gaza in July alone, 24 of them children under five, according to the World Health Organization. Benjamin Netanyahu is the man an international court has charged with causing that starvation. Now New York City is asking whether it can arrest him for it.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani said on 18 July that his administration is in “an active conversation” with the city’s Law Department over whether he can order the NYPD to detain Netanyahu on his International Criminal Court warrant if the Israeli prime minister comes to New York for the UN General Assembly in September. “I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague,” Mamdani told the *New York Times*. “He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court.”
The ICC issued that warrant on 21 November 2024, finding reasonable grounds that Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, bore criminal responsibility for starvation as a method of warfare and for murder and persecution as crimes against humanity, covering the period from 8 October 2023 to 20 May 2024. Aid trucks are entering Gaza at roughly 28 a day, against 500 to 600 before the war, per UN and WHO figures.
Netanyahu arrest in New York: the legal reality
A Netanyahu arrest in New York is not close to happening, and Mamdani said as much: “Whatever the law allows me to do in New York City, that’s what we will do, but we won’t be writing our own laws to that end.” The United States is not an ICC member state and recognises no obligation to enforce its warrants. Diplomatic immunity for a head of government attending the UN, and federal supremacy over local policing, make an NYPD arrest close to impossible. Governor Kathy Hochul has already said the mayor lacks the authority. Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, says Netanyahu will attend regardless, and Israeli officials are reportedly angling to slot his speech around Sukkot. Netanyahu called Mamdani a Hamas sympathiser who “secretly hates America”; Mamdani has separately condemned the 7 October attack and denounced Hamas.
Britain’s evasion
Unlike the US, Britain is a party to the Rome Statute. Under the International Criminal Court Act 2001, passed by Tony Blair’s government, the UK is legally obliged to arrest Netanyahu if he sets foot on British soil. Asked directly, Keir Starmer’s spokesperson would say only that “the UK will always comply with its legal obligations”, refusing to confirm an arrest would follow.
Britain is bound to arrest the man charged with starving Gaza’s children and will not say it would. In May, ministers quietly approved an £8.7m licence for components and technology for Israeli targeting equipment, on top of the F-35 parts exemption that keeps British-made components reaching Israeli jets through third countries, months after Downing Street’s own partial suspension of arms exports over Gaza.
The mayor of New York is asking whether the law can reach Netanyahu. London already knows the answer and would rather not say it out loud.
