New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in a recorded conversation that if he had his way, the United States government would have joined the International Criminal Court and honored every warrant the court has issued — a statement made in direct response to a question about whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would have been arrested.
The exchange was carried by the account @clashreport, which posted the video along with a transcript. In it, the interviewer, comedian Theo Von, asks Mamdani whether, given his say, "we would have arrested the guy." Mamdani answers: "If I had my say, the U.S. government would have joined the ICC, honored every single warrant that they've issued." Von responds, "Fuck yeah."
The conversation is the most direct of several statements Mamdani has made about the Israeli prime minister in recent days, all of which have circulated through the same account and been picked up by other outlets and posters. In another clip posted by @clashreport, Mamdani describes Netanyahu as "the architect of a horrific genocide."
"When you ask me about Netanyahu, we're talking about the architect of a horrific genocide," Mamdani says, according to the transcript. "People talk about a ceasefire. Just last week, the Israeli military killed an eleven-year-old Palestinian boy in Gaza in a section that's considered to be a safe zone. This is continuing."
Mamdani goes on to describe a meeting at Gracie Mansion, the mayor's official residence, with what he says were a number of Palestinian families from Gaza. "To hear from them about the way that their lives have been shattered," he says. "You meet two sisters and their mother, and they tell you that the same airstrike that injured one of them ended up killing two of their brothers, that they lived in a tent, that the father in that family is still there. You speak to an older grandmother, and at the end of the meeting, she just comes up and says, like, can you bring my son here? And having to tell her, like, I will try, but as the mayor, I can't promise you that."
He closes that portion by saying the families "just want their family, they want safety, they want dignity."
Asked in a third clip whether the matter had become personal between him and Netanyahu, Mamdani framed the prime minister's response as an attempt to change the subject. "All of this is an attempt to distract from responsibility. Name as many people as possible, try and make it into a back-and-forth. It's not about me and him. It's about the fact that he's the architect of a genocide," Mamdani says. "And it's like, yeah, if I was the architect of a genocide, I would probably talk about anything but that."
That clip followed Netanyahu's address to the United Nations General Assembly, during which, according to Mamdani's account, the prime minister attacked him by name.
The conversation with Von was not the only Mamdani-related item moving through conservative and news accounts the same night. The account @amuse posted that Mamdani "is using his taxpayer-funded influencers to attack the city's CEOs." Newsmax, posting under @NEWSMAX, reported that the mayor is coordinating with roughly two hundred influencers to build public pressure for his tax-the-rich agenda, citing a report this week that details a campaign aimed at prominent New York City business leaders.
Separately, The Independent reported that Netanyahu told passengers and crew aboard an Israel flight about a hijacking attempt, saying the attacker was "clearly suicidal" and shouted "kill me" after being subdued. Netanyahu also said the co-pilot, whom Israel says was Omani, had undergone questioning. That account comes from Netanyahu himself and from Israeli officials, and it is separate from the exchange between Mamdani and Von.
It is not yet known whether the White House, the Israeli government or the International Criminal Court has responded to Mamdani's remarks. It is also not known whether the warrants he referred to include one naming Netanyahu; the mayor did not specify which warrants he meant in the clip, and the transcript does not identify them.
The Israeli military operation in Gaza and the events Mamdani describes in it have been the subject of extensive and continuing dispute. Claims about specific strikes, casualty figures and the designation of safe zones have been contested by Israeli officials, who say their forces target militants and take steps to warn civilians. Next News Network could not independently verify the accounts Mamdani related from his meeting with Palestinian families, nor the specific strike he described.
What is documented is what was said. A sitting American mayor, in a recorded interview, said he would have had the United States join the ICC and honor its warrants, and called a foreign head of government the architect of a genocide. The clip circulated through @clashreport, was amplified on @amuse and @NEWSMAX, and drew on a longer conversation in which Mamdani described families he met at Gracie Mansion.
The reaction spread across accounts that rarely agree on anything, which is itself the story: a local mayor's foreign policy comments are now being treated as national news on the right, the left and everywhere between.
Our Take
There are two ways to read what Zohran Mamdani said, and conservatives should be clear-eyed about both. The first is that he said it out loud, on camera, in plain English: a major American mayor called for the United States to bend its foreign policy to the International Criminal Court and to honor its warrants — including, by obvious implication, any warrant against the elected leader of Israel. That is not a slip of the tongue. It is a position, and voters in New York and elsewhere deserve to hear it stated as such.
The second is that this is what the progressive movement's foreign policy looks like when it holds real power in an American city. For years, critics warned that activists who cut their teeth on campus resolutions against Israel would graduate into offices with actual authority. Mamdani is the test case, and he is not hiding it. He is using the mayor's office, the mayor's residence and a network that Newsmax describes as roughly two hundred influencers to push an agenda that treats the Israeli prime minister as a war criminal and the United States as his accomplice.
Conservatives should not pretend this is fringe. It is a sitting mayor, on the record, saying he would have arrested a close American ally's prime minister. That is a serious break from decades of bipartisan practice, and it deserves to be reported as one — not buried under speculation about whether the ICC's claims will ever be tested. They almost certainly will not. The point is not whether it is legal. The point is that someone with power wants it to be.
And the response on the right should be proportionate. Mamdani is entitled to his views, and he is entitled to say them. What he is not entitled to is to have those views go unexamined, or to have his use of taxpayer-funded infrastructure to advance them go unmentioned. If the mayor wants to campaign against Israel from Gracie Mansion, he should say so plainly and let New Yorkers judge. He did. Now they will.
