New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani sat down with comedian Theo Von on Von's podcast "This Past Weekend" and said the United States should join the International Criminal Court and honor the warrants that court issues — including the one hanging over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Then he added the part that matters for anyone who heard him on the campaign trail: the mayor's office cannot carry out that arrest.
"We do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this," Mamdani said, according to the aggregator Hoodline, which summarized the exchange. That quote comes from a single aggregator account and has not been checked against the episode audio. It is a different sentence than the one that got him attention during the 2025 mayoral race, when he pledged that Netanyahu would be arrested if he set foot in New York City. Von pressed him on exactly that promise, and the answer came back wrapped in federal process rather than municipal authority.
The Daily Beast, whose account was republished by Yahoo News, reported that Von responded with enthusiasm to Mamdani's ICC answer. Von is not a small player in this conversation — he hosted Donald Trump on the show during the 2024 campaign and has since been publicly critical of Israel's military operations in Gaza, which makes his audience an unusual room for the new mayor of New York.
What the ICC Warrant Actually Is
The International Criminal Court issued its arrest warrant for Netanyahu in November 2024, alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity connected to Israel's military campaign in Gaza. Netanyahu has denied the allegations.
There is a detail that tends to get left out of the viral clips: neither Israel nor the United States is a member of the ICC. That means Mamdani's position is not a call to enforce existing American law. It is a call to change American policy — to have the United States join a court it does not belong to, and then to act on that court's orders against the head of government of a close ally.
That is a question for the Senate, the president and the State Department rather than for a city executive, and Mamdani said as much on the podcast.
Promise Meets Process
Hoodline characterized the remarks as a retreat from the earlier pledge. That is one reading, and it is the aggregator's framing rather than a fact. Other outlets covered the same audio this week — the New York Post and the Jerusalem Post ran their own versions, and a wire story, attributed to the Associated Press and likely a single piece of copy, was picked up by Sinclair-owned television stations. How those accounts frame the exchange is the main thing worth checking, and Patriot Daily Wire has not been able to review them.
What is not in dispute is the gap between campaign rhetoric and the actual authority of a mayor. A mayor commands a police department that enforces New York State penal law. He does not execute international warrants, he does not control federal entry decisions, and he cannot detain a visiting head of government protected by federal and diplomatic arrangements.
What We Could Not Confirm
A few items circulating with this story remain unverified. A phrase attributed to Mamdani in a Jerusalem Post headline — describing Netanyahu as the "architect of horrific genocide" — could not be checked against the audio, and whether Mamdani used the word "genocide" at all in this interview, and in what construction, is unresolved. The exact air date, episode number and timestamp of the exchange were not confirmed. Von's reported reaction appears in a Daily Beast headline rather than as a confirmed verbatim line from the tape.
No response has been recorded from Netanyahu's office, the Israeli consulate in New York, the White House, the State Department or the ICC.
The next step belongs to the tape. The full episode will settle what Mamdani said and in what order, and whether he has since repeated the line or moved on from it. Until that is confirmed, the plainest summary is the one the mayor is reported to have supplied himself: he thinks the arrest should happen, and he cannot make it happen.
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