WASHINGTON/HERZLIYA: US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that Washington is ending a 10-year security assistance deal with Israel that allowed $3.8 billion in annual assistance to its ally until 2028.
Trump said Israel was “fine” with him ending the assistance, which began in 2019 and was signed under his predecessor, Barack Obama, three years earlier. “We’ll help Israel if they need it,” he added in an interview on US current affairs show Fox and Friends, saying that he had agreed with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cut the assistance.
“Israel’s our number one; we give them more than anybody else, and they no longer need it … If they did need it, I would say keep it going,” Trump added. Under the deal, Israel receives financial assistance for the purchase of around $3.8 billion of weapons a year.
Since its founding in 1948, Israel has received more than $300 billion, adjusted for inflation, in US economic and military assistance, according to figures from the Council on Foreign Relations, far more than any other country has received since 1946.
Eisenkot vows to remove Netanyahu quickly but path unclear
The Israeli premier has previously said he wanted to end Israel’s reliance on US support. In June, Netanyahu called for his country to increase its military autonomy and reduce its reliance on Washington.
In January he told The Economist that he hoped to do so within a decade, while in May he told US broadcaster CBS that he wanted support to reach “zero”. On Tuesday, Trump cited attacks by leftist Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, who is running for the US Senate in Tuesday’s midterm elections after harnessing popular discontent and anti-Israel sentiment, as part of the reasoning behind the decision.
“Why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like an El-Sayed when they don’t need it?” he said on Fox, referring to Israel and the aid.
Netanyahu’s future
The Israeli opposition bloc led by Gadi Eisenkot pledged on Tuesday to form a government quickly to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but remained unclear on how, with divisions over whether to ally with Arab lawmakers.
Meeting for the first time since an election a week ago brought an inconclusive result, the five opposition party heads consulted on strategy at a hotel in Herzliya, the tech industry hub north of Tel Aviv where former military chief Eisenkot lives.
In a joint statement, the party leaders said their goal was forming a government “as quickly as possible and preventing Israel from being dragged into another election”.
They stood by four benchmarks set out by Eisenkot including that any parties in the government recognise Israel as a Jewish state and denounce Hamas as a terrorist group — conditions that could exclude some Arab lawmakers.
The leaders “agreed on the need to form a Zionist government at the earliest opportunity, based on the four principles set out by Eisenkot”, it said.
Unsourced Israeli media reports said the leaders put more emphasis on forming an alliance with Orthodox Jewish parties, traditional backers of Netanyahu, than with Arab parties. Arab lawmakers could bring Eisenkot a majority which neither bloc now holds.
Arab-majority parties last week won 19 seats in the 120-member parliament on the back of anger over the hard-right Netanyahu government’s rhetoric towards Arab citizens of Israel.
Published in Dawn, November 4th, 2026
