FRANCE PERSPECTIVE

Paris, July 20, 2026. French newsrooms are covering with caution the announcement by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is engaged in "active discussions" with New York authorities on the legal possibility of arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the UN General Assembly in September. "I believe Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague. He is a war criminal with an outstanding arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court," he said in an interview with the New York Times published on Saturday, quoted in full by Le Monde, BFMTV, Sud Ouest, and the HuffPost. The mayor acknowledges his uncertainty: "Everything the law allows me to do in New York is what we will do." He had already promised to send the municipal police to execute the ICC's warrants against Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin.

The Israeli response is reported in detail. Danny Danon, Israel's ambassador to the UN, accuses the mayor of trying to "fan the flames of hostility and make headlines by targeting the State of Israel," ensuring that Netanyahu "will come to New York" despite everything. On a New York radio station, the Israeli Prime Minister goes further, accusing Mamdani of supporting Hamas: "I think deep down, he hates the United States." Sud Ouest recalls the political context of the Democratic mayor, from the left wing of the party, who has described Israel as a "state that uses apartheid-like policies" and denounced the Gaza offensive as a "genocide."

This confrontation directly affects France, also a State Party to the Rome Statute and faced with its own ambiguities about executing the warrant against Netanyahu if he visits French soil. The French treatment remains focused on the factual reporting of statements rather than on an editorial commentary, without any of the cited media taking a position on the actual legality of such an arrest by a municipal police force. The question of whether the mayor really has the power to apprehend a foreign head of state remains, according to these same articles, unresolved by Mamdani himself.