On his second day in office, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order to suspend all of its foreign aid programmes to other countries, saying the previous administration of Joe Biden had allocated money to unnecessary assistance programmes.
In a press conference on Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that one of those unnecessary programmes included sending $50m worth of condoms and contraceptives to Gaza, where, for the past 15 months, Israel has waged a full-scale war and limited all aid entering the Palestinian enclave.
Leavitt said the $50m was located by the Department of Government Efficiency, a new task force created by Trump and led by billionaire Elon Musk.
“We identified and stopped $50m being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas,” Trump said on Wednesday.
“They used them as a method of making bombs. How about that?”
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The claim from the Trump administration drew widespread confusion and scepticism until, on Thursday, an account on X found there was a US grant worth $83m that was directed towards the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases in Gaza.
However, the Gaza referenced in the grant description wasn’t in the occupied Palestinian territories.
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It was referring to a province in Mozambique. Gaza is a rural province in the African nation and is the country’s least populated, with an estimated population of just over one million people.
The grant was given to the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation, which works on different health programmes in Mozambique.
It’s unclear whether this is what the Trump administration was referring to, given that there are multiple locations in the world named Gaza, including inside the US.
USAid reports for the years between 2007 and 2023 do not show any records of condoms being shipped to the Gaza Strip. And Dana Stroul, a former Pentagon official, said on X that USAid didn’t spend any money on the Gaza Strip in 2023.
Throughout the Israeli war on Gaza, which began in October 2023, Israeli authorities limited the amount of aid allowed into the Palestinian territory.
The Trump administration has also backed Israel’s crackdown on the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, which provides aid to the millions of Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza and several Palestinian refugee camps in neighbouring Arab countries.
