The United States will stop providing about $4 billion a year in aid to Israel in 2027 and instead sell weapons to its closest ally in the Middle East, President Donald Trump has said.
Mr Trump made the announcement on Tuesday in a telephone call to Fox News, on the day Americans voted in midterm elections. He said Mr Netanyahu had raised the idea with him and that the two leaders had been discussing it for a couple of years.
“They don’t need it,” Mr Trump said of the aid, describing it as a large amount of money for the United States to spend. He added that Israel, as a thriving country, could buy American military equipment directly instead of receiving it through aid.
There was no immediate comment from Mr Netanyahu’s office on the announcement, and no formal directive, executive order or published agreement setting out how the change would work was reported alongside it. That leaves important questions unanswered, including exactly which funding would stop, when, and how the change would be handled legally.
The timing is also uncertain. The current security arrangement, signed in 2016, committed $38 billion in military aid over ten years, working out at about $3.8 billion a year, and is due to run until 2028. Ending the payments in 2027 would therefore come about a year before that agreement expires, and Congress would have a large say in any wind-down.
Mr Netanyahu has previously spoken about weaning Israel off American aid. In January he told The Economist that he wanted to taper off military assistance over the next ten years and that such a change was in the works.
The politics of the payment have also featured in the announcement. Mr Trump said the $4 billion figure had become a talking point for critics, including Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and argued that removing it would take away an easy target.
Much of the existing assistance takes the form of foreign military financing, which gives Israel funds that must be spent on American-produced weaponry, returning the money to the United States economy. Unless Israel spends a similar amount buying American equipment, American defence contractors could feel an effect from the change.
The scale of recent assistance puts the annual figure in context. A study published last year estimated that the United States had provided at least $21.7 billion in military assistance to Israel since the start of the Gaza war in 2023, under both the Biden and Trump administrations. A separate study by Brown University’s Costs of War project estimated roughly $10 billion more in American security aid and operations across the wider Middle East over the previous two years.
For now, the announcement signals a major proposed change in one of the world’s longest-running military assistance relationships, but its implementation — and whether Congress agrees to end the payments a year early — remains to be worked out.
Note: the featured image is a file photo of President Donald Trump welcoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on 4 February 2025, not a photograph of Tuesday’s announcement.
Sources: Associated Press, “US Will Halt $4B in Aid to Israel as the Mideast Ally Shifts to Buying Military Hardware, Trump Says”, 3 November 2026, https://www.military.com/us-will-halt-4b-in-aid-to-israel-as-the-mideast-ally-shifts-to-buying-military-hardware-trump-says
