Trump Says US Will Stop $4 Billion Israel Aid After This Year

Photo: Reuters via Arab News (Trump with Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago, Florida, 29 December 2025, file photo)

Donald Trump says the United States will stop paying Israel $4 billion a year after this year ends. He told Fox News on Tuesday that he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made the deal months ago, because Israel no longer needs the money.

Trump spoke on Fox News' Fox and Friends on the morning of the US midterm elections, as voting was under way. Al Jazeera reported his words plainly: "Now, as far as paying Israel, Bibi Netanyahu and I have made a deal that we give Israel $4bn a year, and we made a deal months ago that we're stopping."

"We've already agreed that by the end of this year we won't be paying Israel. Now we'll help Israel if they need it," he added.

Asked why the payments would end, he kept it short. "Because they don't need it," he said. "If they did need it, I would say keep it going." He said Netanyahu himself had raised it, saying it would be appropriate for Israel not to receive aid.

He also tied it to politics at home. He said Democrats and left wing politicians were using the $4 billion payment as a talking point against Republicans, and he did not want his party to keep taking hits over money he says Israel does not need.

There is one big gap in the announcement, and Trump did not fill it. It is not clear yet which exact funding he means. Reuters reported the same uncertainty, noting that a memorandum of understanding giving Israel $3.8 billion a year in military aid runs to 2028, with talks already under way on what comes next.

Neither side has spelled it out in writing yet. Dawn reported that there was no immediate comment from Netanyahu's office, and Al Jazeera said the US State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Netanyahu has talked about ending dependence on US aid before, but never on this short a timeline. Dawn noted that he told CBS in May that he hoped to wean Israel off US military support within a decade, and wrote to a US congressman in June that the time had come for Israel "to move from aid recipient to partner".

The politics behind the move have been shifting for a while. In July the US House voted 314 to 104 against an amendment to cut off aid to Israel, even though nearly half of Democrats backed it. A June Quinnipiac poll found 48 percent of voters and 66 percent of Democrats believed the United States was too supportive of Israel, up from 16 percent and 20 percent when the question was first asked in 2017.

Not everyone is buying the timing. Former Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on X that getting Netanyahu's permission to end annual aid was not going to change Tuesday's election results.

For readers following the wider story, this is a sharp turn from the usual Washington line, and it sits alongside a string of Trump stories this week, from his bid to block California ballots to the Supreme Court rejecting that bid and his approval rating sliding to 32 percent. It also matters for Gaza, where Israeli strikes killed four people this week as the ceasefire failed to hold.

If the payments really do stop at year end, it would end decades of yearly US aid two years before the current military aid deal runs out. But Trump himself left the door open, saying help would continue if Israel needed it, so the fine print will decide how big a change this really is.

Sources

Al Jazeera: Trump says that US will stop paying Israel aid after year-end

Reuters: Trump says US will stop paying Israel after year-end

Dawn (Reuters): Trump says US will stop $4 billion funding to Israel at end of 2026

Watch for a formal statement from Washington or Jerusalem spelling out exactly which payments stop and when.

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