President Trump says the United States will cut off $4 billion in annual aid to Israel at year’s end under a deal with Netanyahu, stripping the left of a favorite attack line against the alliance.
President Donald Trump told NBC News audiences, in a Tuesday phone interview with “Fox & Friends,” that he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu struck an agreement months ago to stop the yearly transfer. The money, Trump said, gets “cut off at the end of the year.”
He framed the move as common sense for a strong ally that no longer needs the cash, and as a way to deny progressive Democrats a ready-made grievance. Voters were already heading to the polls for the midterms when he spoke.
Netanyahu’s office declined to comment Tuesday. Trump said the idea came from the Israeli leader himself.
Trump did not present the decision as a punishment or a sudden break. He cast it as a mutual judgment that Israel’s success makes the old arrangement outdated.
He said the Israeli government was “fine with it because, you know, they have become a very successful country” and “they don’t need” the money. He also left the door open for future help.
"We’ll help Israel if they need it, you know they’ve been a great ally,"
Trump said. On the origin of the deal, he was direct.
"Can I be honest with you? He brought it up. He said: ‘I think it would be appropriate if we do not receive aid,’ because he understands that this is one of their points of contention."
That matches a line Netanyahu has floated before. In January, the prime minister said he hoped to “taper off” American military aid over the next decade. Trump’s version accelerates the endpoint to the close of this year.
The New York Post reported the same core announcement: the two leaders agreed months ago to end the roughly $4 billion annual flow after year-end, with Israel still able to buy U.S. weapons and with Netanyahu having pushed publicly to reduce reliance since at least January.
Trump tied the cutoff to domestic politics as much as to alliance management. He argued that the well-known transfer had become a cheap target for the left.
"The left uses the $4 billion payment that everybody knows about, when it’s no secret, as a signal of unfairness, and we can’t allow that to happen."
He added that the attack was too convenient.
"I don’t like that because you know it’s too easy. It’s almost too easy a target. Why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like an El-Sayed when they don’t need it?"
Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s progressive Democratic Senate nominee, has hammered Israel and U.S. foreign policy on the campaign trail. Trump named him as the kind of critic who treats the aid figure as proof of injustice rather than as support for a longtime partner.
In that telling, ending a subsidy Israel says it can live without is not abandonment. It is refusing to keep funding a talking point.
The precise account Trump’s $4 billion figure covers was not immediately clear. The standing framework most often cited is the 2016 memorandum of understanding signed under President Barack Obama.
That deal took effect in October 2018 and runs through 2028. It locked in $3.8 billion a year: $3.3 billion in military financing grants and $500 million for joint missile defense. Nearly all of it must be spent on purchases from the United States.
Aid rose further after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the war that followed. A paper by William D. Hartung of the Quincy Institute, written for Brown University’s Costs of War project, estimated the United States spent at least $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel in the two years after October 7. Hartung wrote that U.S. arms have been “central” to Israel Defense Forces and Israel Police operations, and that American systems account for Israel’s entire inventory of combat-capable aircraft, figures that, as of the study’s publication the prior October, included 75 F-15s, 196 F-16s, and 39 F-35s.
Foreign Military Financing is approved by the State Department and carried out by the Pentagon. Trump’s announcement points to a hard stop on the large annual transfer, not a ban on future sales or emergency help.
Inside Israel, Netanyahu’s rivals treated the news as proof of reckless leadership rather than prudent burden-sharing.
Gadi Eisenkot, a former IDF chief of staff who now heads the Yashar party and has drawn backing from other Netanyahu opponents after inconclusive elections last month, attacked the prime minister for letting the country learn of a strategic shift through the press.
"The fact that the defense establishment, along with the citizens of Israel, learned of a shift in the strategic relationship through the media, demonstrates just how much Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct poses a real danger. He can no longer be trusted, and he must be replaced,"
Eisenkot said.
Yair Golan, head of the left-wing Democrats party, called the cutoff a direct hit on security and living standards at a moment of heavy defense costs.
"The cessation of American aid deals a severe blow to Israel’s security and the quality of life in the country. At a time when Israel’s defense expenditures have reached massive proportions, when Israel needs to replenish its stocks of offensive weaponry, and when air defense capabilities have been eroded following such a prolonged war, Netanyahu has notched yet another colossal failure to his name."
Those critics want Netanyahu gone. Trump presented the same decision as evidence that Israel is strong enough to stand without the annual check, and that Washington should stop handing its opponents an easy slogan.
Energy traders reacted fast. Brent crude slid 3% to $101 after Trump’s comments, the lowest level in more than three weeks, before ticking back to $103 as of noon ET. Oil had already posted its biggest one-day drop in three months on Monday.
The alliance context is wider than the aid line alone. Trump and Netanyahu launched a war on Iran earlier this year, and munitions stocks in the United States have been under strain. On Monday, Trump told NBC News he was not planning to attack Iran after the midterms. The aid announcement landed the next day as a separate fiscal and political choice, not as a break in military cooperation.
What remains unsettled is the paperwork. No full text of a new written agreement appeared in the initial reporting. The 2016 memorandum still formally runs to 2028. Netanyahu has not confirmed the deal on the record. Trump says the cutoff is set for the end of the year and that the relationship survives it.
Allies that can pay their own way should not remain a permanent prop for politicians who treat every dollar of support as proof of American guilt.
