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international criminal court
GOP NYC Councilwoman Openly Dares Mamdani to Arrest Netanyahu With New Year's Invite
Despite Mamdani's campaign pledge, legal experts have consistently cast doubt on a New York City mayor's authority to order the arrest of a foreign leader.
Nov 11, 2025
New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani may have a chance to fulfill one of his campaign promises on his first day of office, although legal experts have repeatedly cast doubt on his power to make it happen.
Republican New York City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov on Tuesday sent a formal invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak in New York City on January 1, 2026, while at the same time daring Mamdani to keep his pledge to have him arrested on war crimes charges.
"On January 1, Mamdani will take office," Vernikov wrote in a post on X. "And also on January 1, I look forward to welcoming Bibi to New York City. NY will always stand with Israel, and no radical Marxists with a title can change that."
The International Criminal Court (ICC) last year issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during Israel's war in Gaza that has killed at least 69,000 Palestinians.
During his successful mayoral campaign, Mamdani repeatedly said that he would enforce the warrant against Netanyahu should the Israeli leader set foot in his city.
Although Mamdani backed off some of his most strident past statements during the campaign, particularly when it comes to the New York Police Department (NYPD), he doubled down on arresting Netanyahu during a September interview with The New York Times.
"This is a moment where we cannot look to the federal government for leadership," Mamdani told the paper. "This is a moment when cities and states will have to demonstrate what it actually looks like to stand up for our own values, our own people."
However, legal experts who spoke with the Times cast doubt on Mamdani's authority as the mayor of a major American city to arrest a foreign head of government, even if the person in question has been indicted by the ICC.
Among other things, experts said that the NYPD does not have jurisdiction to arrest Netanyahu on international war crimes charges, and the Israeli leader would have to commit some crime in violation of local state or city laws to justify such an action.
Additionally, the US has never been party to the ICC and does not recognize its legal authority.
Matthew Waxman, a professor at Columbia Law School, told the Times that Mamdani's stated determination to arrest Netanyahu was "more a political stunt than a serious law-enforcement policy."
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ICC Collecting War Crimes Evidence Against Sudanese Militia After Darfur Massacre
The court said the actions of Sudan's Rapid Support Forces, who are backed by a US ally in the UAE, "may constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity."
Nov 04, 2025
The International Criminal Court said it is collecting and preserving evidence of war crimes in Sudan's Darfur region following a massacre committed by a militia group and amid reports of widespread starvation.
In a statement published Monday, the ICC—the international body charged with prosecuting crimes against humanity—expressed "profound alarm and deepest concern over recent reports emerging from El-Fasher about mass killings, rapes, and other crimes" allegedly committed by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which breached the city last week.
According to the Sudan Doctors Network (SDN), a medical organization monitoring the country's brutal civil war, the militants slaughtered more than 1,500 people in just three days after capturing El-Fasher, among them more than 460 people who were systematically shot at the city's Saudi Maternity Hospital.
The ICC said that "such acts, if substantiated, may constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute," the court's founding treaty, which lays out the definitions for acts including genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
The court said it was "taking immediate steps regarding the alleged crimes in El-Fasher to preserve and collect relevant evidence for its use in future prosecutions."
The announcement comes shortly following a new report from the UN-affiliated Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the world's leading authority on hunger crises, which found that famine has been detected in El-Fasher and the town of Kadugli in Sudan's South Kordofan province. Twenty other localities in the two provinces—which have seen some of the civil war's worst fighting—are also in danger of famine, according to the report.
The two areas have suffered under siege from the RSF paramilitary, which has cut off access to food, water, and medical care. The IPC says it has led to the "total collapse of livelihoods, starvation, extremely high levels of malnutrition and death."
According to the UN's migration authority, nearly 37,000 people have been forced to flee cities across North Kordofan between October 26 and 31. They joined more than 650,000 displaced people who were already taking refuge in North Darfur's city of Tawila.
Sudan's civil war, which began in 2023, has created the world's largest humanitarian crisis, with potentially as many as 150,000 people killed since it began. Over 12 million people have been displaced, and 30.4 million people, over half of Sudan’s total population, are in need of humanitarian support.
The recent escalation of the crisis has led to heightened global scrutiny of RSF's chief financier, the United Arab Emirates. In recent days, US politicians and activists have called for the Trump administration to halt military assistance to the Gulf state, which it sold $1.4 billion in military aircraft in May.
On Tuesday, Emirati diplomats admitted for the first time that they "made a mistake" supporting the RSF as it attempted to undermine Sudan's transitional democratic government, which took power in 2019 after over three decades of rule by the Islamist-aligned dictator Omar al-Bashir. Those efforts culminated in a military coup in 2021 and an eventual power struggle for control over the country.
However, as Sudanese journalist Nesrine Malik wrote in The Guardian on Monday, the UAE "continues to deny its role, despite overwhelming evidence."
"The UAE secures a foothold in a large, strategic, resource-rich country, and already receives the majority of gold mined in RSF-controlled areas," Malik wrote. "Other actors have been drawn in, overlaying proxy agendas on a domestic conflict. The result is deadlock, quagmire, and blood loss that seems impossible to stem, even as the crisis unravels in full view."
"Sudan’s war is described as forgotten, but in reality it is tolerated and relegated," she continued. "Because to reckon with the horror in Sudan... is to see the growing imperialist role of some Gulf powers in Africa and beyond—and to acknowledge the fact that no meaningful pressure is applied to these powers, including the UAE, to cease and desist from supporting a genocidal militia because the UK, US, and others are close allies with these states."
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Dozens Arrested as 1,000+ Jews Demand Gaza Ceasefire at Rabbi-Led Yom Kippur Protest in NYC
Protesters blocked traffic to the Brooklyn Bridge, embodying the ancient Jewish tenets of justice, righteousness, and saving life.
Oct 03, 2025
Dozens of people were arrested in New York City on Thursday during a protest led by rabbis on Yom Kippur—the holiest day of the Jewish calendar—demanding a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and an end to US complicity in Israel's genocide.
More than 1,000 Jews plus allies turned out for the demonstration, which was led by the group Rabbis for Ceasefire. The protest started around 3:30 pm local time at Brooklyn Borough Hall, where rabbis led a Yizkor, a memorial prayer of mourning recited just four times per year, including on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement and repentance.
Some protesters carried a banner reading, "Not Another Bomb," written in Hebrew and English.
"Our heart is broken for every single person who has been murdered, and we want to convey the fact that this has to end," Rabbi Elliot Kukla told CBS New York.
Protesters then marched to the Brooklyn Bridge, where some sat down, locked their arms together, and sang while blocking traffic to the span. New York Police Department (NYPD) officers subsequently arrested at least 56 people, according to the New York Post.
Many of the arrested protesters chanted, "Let Gaza Live!" as their hands were zip-tied and they were hauled off to an awaiting NYPD bus.
Asked why she was arrested, one keffiyeh-clad woman said, "Because I’m using this sacred holiday of Yom Kippur, as a Jewish person whose ancestors perished during the Holocaust, to protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people in my name."
"And I say, not in my name," she added.
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Speakers at the protest included New York City Comptroller Brad Lander—an ally of Democratic mayoral candidate and staunch Palestine defender Zohran Mamdani—who told the crowd that "we must today take collective responsibility for what the Israeli government has been doing, is doing today, on Yom Kippur," with "over 65,000 Palestinians killed, mostly women and children, whole families wiped out, food used as a weapon."
Earlier this week, President Donald Trump welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. The right-wing Israeli leader is a fugitive from the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which last year ordered his arrest for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder and forced starvation.
Like former President Joe Biden before him, Trump has approved billions of dollars in US armed aid to Israel, even while senior Trump administration officials acknowledge that children and others are starving to death in Gaza.
Lander took aim at US complicity in the genocide, decrying "the bombs funded by our taxpayer dollars in the name of the Jewish state," as well as the "desecration of Judaism."
Grateful to Rabbis for Ceasefire, @jfrejnyc.bsky.social and the other organizers of yesterday's mass mourning and collective atonement at Brooklyn Borough Hall. Let us steady and care for one another, and persevere together. #YomKippur
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— Office of NYC Comptroller Brad Lander (@nyccomptroller.bsky.social) October 3, 2025 at 8:01 AM
The Jewish religion emphasizes the ancient tenets of tzedek, mishpat, and din—righteousness, justice, and law—as well as pikuach nefesh, or saving life, which overrides nearly every other religious law including kosher dietary restrictions and keeping the Sabbath.
Just 2.4% of the US population, Jews have had an outsize presence at pro-Palestine demonstrations since October 2023, with groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and Rabbis for Ceasefire often leading large protests against Israel's war and US complicity under both Trump and Biden.
Jews have opposed Zionism—the mainly European settler-colonial movement to reestablish a Jewish homeland in Palestine—since the earliest days of the experiment. Even some early Zionists foresaw the genesis of events like the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, with Ahad Ha'am, father of cultural Zionism, writing after an 1891 trip to Palestine that "if the time comes when [Jews are] encroaching upon the native population, they will not easily yield their place."
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