US President Donald Trump pledged to protect Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from arrest on American soil, while repeating an unsupported riot death toll and distorting nearly five decades of US-Iranian confrontation to deflect attention from the international criminal case against the Israeli leader.

“Benjamin Netanyahu will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America,” Trump wrote Monday on Truth Social.

Trump made the statement after New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said municipal lawyers were examining whether Netanyahu could be detained during a future visit to New York under the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court.

Rather than address the allegations against Netanyahu, Trump claimed that the Israeli premier was “fighting against the Islamic Republic of Iran,” which he accused of recently killing “52,000 innocent protesters” and spending 47 years killing American soldiers.

Fighting Iran does not invalidate ICC warrant

Trump’s description of Netanyahu as “fighting against” Iran has no bearing on the case before the ICC.

The court’s warrant concerns Netanyahu’s responsibility for crimes committed against Palestinians in Gaza, not his government’s confrontation with Tehran.

The ICC says Netanyahu is accused of the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and crimes against humanity, including murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts. Judges determined that there were reasonable grounds to believe he bore criminal responsibility for the alleged conduct.

Invoking Iran therefore does not answer, disprove, or even address the allegations underlying the warrant. It changes the subject from Palestinian victims to Washington’s geopolitical confrontation with Tehran.

Trump’s statement also incorrectly treats Netanyahu’s political alignment with the United States as though it constituted a legal defense. Whether Washington regards Netanyahu as an ally has no relevance to whether the ICC’s allegations are substantiated.

Trump manufactures 52,000-death narrative against Iran

Trump offered no evidence, source or methodology for his claim that Iran had “recently killed 52,000 innocent protesters,” and no publicly available accounting supports that figure.

Iranian authorities reported 3,117 deaths linked to the armed riots, including different categories of victims rather than protesters alone. Even opposition-linked monitors cited by Western media produced far lower confirmed totals and acknowledged that many additional reports remained unverified.

Trump nevertheless recast every reported death as an “innocent protester” killed by the Iranian government, erasing security personnel, civilians, and others killed amid the violence.

His claim is therefore an unsubstantiated political allegation used to demonize Tehran, justify US-Israeli aggression and divert attention from the international charges facing Netanyahu over the genocide in Gaza.

Claim of 47 years killing US soldiers is misleading

Trump’s claim that Iran spent “the last 47 years killing American soldiers” erases decades of US aggression and falsely portrays resistance to foreign occupation as a continuous Iranian campaign.

There is no evidence that Iranian forces directly killed US troops throughout that period. Washington’s most cited claim concerns a Pentagon assessment attributing 603 US deaths in Iraq between 2003 and 2011 to “Iran-backed” groups, not to direct Iranian military operations.

Those casualties occurred after the United States invaded and occupied Iraq. Iraqi Resistance factions were confronting foreign troops on their own territory, yet Trump strips away that context and reduces every movement opposing Washington to an Iranian proxy.

He also ignores US violence against Iran, including the 1988 downing of Iran Air Flight 655, which killed all 290 civilians aboard.

Trump therefore rewrites a history of US invasions, occupations, and regional resistance as 47 years of one-sided Iranian aggression, absolving Washington of responsibility for the conflicts it created.

Trump erases how current war began

Trump also portrayed Netanyahu as responding defensively to Iranian aggression while omitting that the current war began when the United States and “Israel” unprovokedly attacked Iran on February 28.

Iran subsequently launched retaliatory strikes against Israeli targets and US military positions in the region. Reuters has consistently identified the US-Israeli attacks as the beginning of the conflict.

That chronology debunks Trump’s implication that Iran initiated the present confrontation while Netanyahu merely defended himself.

Political protection presented as justice

Trump concluded that the “only ones that should be arrested” were those who led Iran into what he called a “spiral of death and destruction.”

That is a political declaration, not a legal finding.

No court has determined that defending Netanyahu requires dismissing the ICC case or arresting Iranian leaders instead. Criminal responsibility is individual, and allegations against one government do not cancel proceedings against officials from another.

The United States is not a member of the ICC and is not ordinarily obligated under the Rome Statute to execute its warrants. But Washington’s rejection of the court does not erase the warrant or the judicial findings supporting it.

Trump went further than explaining the US legal position. He gave Netanyahu an advance political guarantee of immunity while relying on unsupported and misleading allegations to justify that protection.

The post ultimately exposed Washington’s selective application of international justice: formal allegations against an Israeli ally were dismissed without examination, while an unverified claim against Iran was presented as fact.

Read more: Araghchi demands evidence for Trump’s 32,000 death toll claim