Israel's top diplomat at the United Nations wants New York City's mayor arrested for supporting Hamas and inciting hostility toward Jews, turning Zohran Mamdani's own arrest rhetoric back on him.
Ambassador Danny Danon made the demand in an exclusive interview with the Washington Free Beacon during UN General Assembly week, accusing Mayor Mamdani of far more than political grandstanding. Danon alleged that Mamdani's administration tried to arrange a meeting between one of its senior officials and Iran's permanent representative to the United Nations, a meeting the U.S. State Department stepped in to block.
The confrontation marks a sharp escalation in a months-long feud between Mamdani and the Israeli government. Mamdani made arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a campaign pledge during his late-2025 mayoral run, vowing to act on an International Criminal Court warrant if Netanyahu set foot in New York. He later walked that pledge back in what amounted to a formal address from Gracie Mansion, the mayor's official residence, after city lawyers concluded New York lacks the legal authority to enforce ICC warrants, and the United States is not even a member of the court.
Danon did not mince words. He accused Mamdani of supporting Hamas, inciting hostility toward the Jewish community, and dispatching his own officials to meet with Iranian diplomats at the UN.
"He incites against the Jewish community. He supported Hamas terrorists. He sent his top officials to meet with the Iranian delegation at the U.N."
The ambassador's sharpest line drew a direct contrast with Mamdani's own arrest threats against Netanyahu.
"If someone should be arrested, [Mamdani] should be arrested, not the Prime Minister of Israel."
At a separate press conference covered by the New York Post, Danon went further, accusing the mayor of "actually collaborating with the enemy of the United States", a reference to the attempted outreach to Iran's UN delegation. That planned meeting, which was slated for July, involved Ana María Archila, Mamdani's commissioner for international affairs. The State Department intervened and the meeting was aborted before it took place.
Mamdani, for his part, has not directly addressed the Iran meeting allegations. His public comments have focused on Netanyahu. In a CNN interview with Christiane Amanpour, the mayor called the Israeli prime minister a "war criminal" and said the ICC warrant should be honored.
"When it comes to Benjamin Netanyahu, I have described him as I believe him to be, a war criminal and an architect of a horrific genocide of the Palestinian people."
Mamdani added that no leader should be "above" international law, stating that "if the International Criminal Court deems someone worthy of an arrest because of a violation of those laws, then who are we to say that anyone should be above that?"
The mayor's framing raises an obvious question he has never answered satisfactorily: why the selective outrage? Mamdani demanded Netanyahu's arrest but went silent when Iran's president arrived in the same city. A mayor who invokes international law to justify arresting the leader of a U.S. ally, yet says nothing when the head of a designated state sponsor of terrorism visits, is not applying a principle. He is picking a side.
None of the mayor's rhetoric has deterred Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister confirmed his plans to address the General Assembly, arriving in New York on September 23 for a speech scheduled September 24 before returning to Israel the same night, Breitbart reported. The 24-hour turnaround underscores both the diplomatic importance of the visit and the security considerations surrounding it.
Netanyahu previewed his posture in a video posted to X earlier in the week, addressing Mamdani directly.
"I'm coming to the U.N. I'm going to tell the truth about our heroic soldiers, and I'm going to tell the truth about you."
He accused the mayor of backing "the Hamas terrorist monsters who butchered our people." The ICC warrant against Netanyahu, issued in November 2024, accuses him of using starvation as a weapon and intentionally targeting civilians in Gaza, charges Israel denies.
Danon dismissed Mamdani's arrest threats as legally meaningless. Fox News reported that the ambassador called the effort "a political stunt," noting that "the U.S. is not part of the ICC" and that "there is no warrant that is actually effective against the prime minister in the U.S." Mamdani himself has acknowledged the city lacks independent legal authority to enforce the warrant and has called on the federal government to act instead, a request the Trump administration has shown no interest in granting.
The administration has moved in the opposite direction. President Trump denounced the ICC during his own address to the General Assembly, and his administration has already placed sanctions on ICC judges and prosecutors. Broader sanctions against the court itself are reportedly in preparation.
The attempted backchannel to Iran's UN delegation fits a pattern. Mamdani has treated City Hall less like a municipal office and more like an independent foreign-policy shop. His administration hosted a secretive global summit in New York while barring the press from most events, and his hiring choices have reflected the same ideological tilt, including naming a radical activist to a $185,000 senior adviser role at City Hall.
Archila, the commissioner whose Iran meeting the State Department shut down, holds a title, commissioner for international affairs, that itself signals Mamdani's ambitions beyond the five boroughs. A city government that creates a dedicated international-affairs post and then uses it to reach out to the Iranian regime is not conducting routine municipal business.
Danon framed the broader environment in stark terms. He described antisemitism as spreading well beyond the UN.
"We feel it every day at the U.N. It's within the heart of the U.N. It's in the streets of the U.S., Europe, all over the world, and we cannot ignore that."
He added that anti-Jewish hostility has reached a new threshold: "Now it's mainstream, it's public, and it's at the highest level we've ever seen."
Danon also took aim at French President Emmanuel Macron, who used his UN address to claim that Hamas "has never been particularly active in the West Bank." Danon called Macron "delusional" and said "he ignores the reality" that Hamas operates inside the West Bank as well as Gaza.
The French Embassy later tried to walk back Macron's remarks, claiming they were mistranslated, though the embassy did not specify what the correct translation should have been. Open-source intelligence estimates cited in the Free Beacon report put the number of Hamas-orchestrated attacks in the West Bank at approximately 150, though that figure comes from an unverified social media account and has not been independently corroborated.
Danon also addressed Iran's posture in nuclear negotiations, describing Iranian officials as unreasonably confident despite military setbacks.
"The feeling I get from the Iranians, they feel like they won the war, which is ridiculous because they lost the war. But I think mentally, they still feel superior and are very arrogant and that is a challenge. You cannot get a reasonable agreement when they feel that they won the war."
On the U.S.-Israel relationship, Danon pushed back against media reports suggesting tension between Washington and Jerusalem. He described the bond as strong and functional, even when the two governments disagree.
"We have a strong bond. It doesn't mean we agree about everything all the time, but we have an open discussion. No surprises, no daylight between Washington and Jerusalem."
Mamdani, meanwhile, has continued to press city lawyers for a legal mechanism to arrest Netanyahu, even after his own administration conceded the effort has no legal foundation. The mayor told CNN that "everyone should be held accountable" to international law, a standard he has applied exclusively to the leader of America's closest Middle Eastern ally, and never to the regime that funds Hamas and whose diplomats his own commissioner tried to meet.
New York City's mayor has the power to fix potholes, fund police, and keep the subways running. Conducting freelance diplomacy with hostile foreign governments is not in the job description, and voters who hired him to run a city, not a shadow State Department, deserve to know why he thinks it is.
