About half of Americans believe the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, should be arrested if he enters the United States, a new Economist/YouGov opinion poll has found.
According to the survey, 49 percent said they favoured arresting Netanyahu on the basis of the warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC). Against that, 27 percent opposed an arrest and 23 percent were not sure about the matter.
Among citizens who voted in the 2024 US presidential election, 74 percent of Kamala Harris’s voters supported arresting Netanyahu. Notably, however, almost a quarter (23 percent) of Donald Trump’s voters also favoured his arrest.
The results of the survey suggest that the demand to hold Netanyahu accountable for Israel’s military operation in Gaza has now spread far beyond the circle of supporters of Palestine.
Among those taking part in the survey, 47 percent of respondents believe Netanyahu is guilty of war crimes in Gaza, while 24 percent disagreed with that view. An equal 47 percent of respondents believe Netanyahu’s actions have damaged relations between Israel and the United States.
The survey also found that 43 percent of Americans believe Israel is carrying out genocide against Palestinian civilians, while 24 percent believe it is not. Among Harris’s voters, 72 percent described Israel’s conduct as genocide, against 22 percent among Trump’s voters.
YouGov conducted the survey among 1,559 adult US citizens between 25 and 27 July 2026.
The ICC issued an arrest warrant against Netanyahu on 21 November 2024 on allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza. The court issued the same warrant against Israel’s former defence minister, Yoav Gallant.
The results of the survey have emerged at a time when Israel is spending millions of dollars to halt the collapse of its support among Americans and to present the Gaza crisis in its own terms.
An investigation carried out this week found that the Israeli government awarded a contract worth 46.5 million dollars to Clock Tower X, a company owned by Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale, to influence what AI chatbots tell users about Israel and Gaza.
The company has created 10 websites that present themselves as sources of news, research or so-called “fact-checking.” These support Israel’s military activities, reject allegations of genocide, question the objectivity of Palestinian journalists killed in Israeli attacks, and publish material casting doubt on the killing of the five-year-old Palestinian child Hind Rajab.
The main aim of this activity is to fill the internet with specifically composed Israeli propaganda, so that AI chatbots find it, quote it or subsequently learn from it.
AI services such as Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Perplexity have already cited information from those Clock Tower websites. In some cases the chatbots did not tell users that the sites had been created on behalf of the Israeli government.
The results of this new survey reveal the depth of the challenge facing Israel’s campaign to shape public opinion through information. Even after spending millions of dollars on AI, online influencers, mass messaging, advertising and conservative media, about half of Americans now want the Israeli prime minister arrested.
The figures further indicate that the erosion of Israel’s standing on the world stage is not merely the result of bad public relations. Rather, a very large section of Americans is now directly rejecting the very conduct and actions of Israel that these campaigns are trying to conceal.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report