The White House’s ‘Feverish Dream’ About $50 Million for Condoms in Gaza
One of the Trump administration’s first acts in office was to freeze almost all foreign aid. The administration claims the move is already bearing fruit.
“There was about to be $50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza. That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Tuesday, citing the White House’s Office of Management and Budget and the newly-created Department of Government Efficiency.
The State Department made an even larger, albeit vaguer, claim. “Prevented $102 million in unjustified funding to a contractor in Gaza, including money for contraception,” spokeswoman Tammy Bruce wrote in a social media thread.
Conservative media seized on the explosive claims. Literally explosive, if you ask Fox News’ Jesse Watters. “Hamas inflates the condoms, straps on an explosive, and floats them into Israel. It’s a dual-use technology,” he said on his show. (There was a wave of incendiary balloon attacks from 2018 to 2021, with a brief resurgence in September 2023.) President Donald Trump himself repeated Watters’ claim about condom bombs at the White House on Wednesday.
On his show, Watters questioned what else Palestinians would be doing with “500 million condoms,” which is “a decade’s supply of safe sex.” It is ridiculous to imagine half a billion contraceptives being sent to a territory of only 2 million people—which is every reason to be skeptical of that claim. Andrew Miller, former deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli-Palestinian affairs, told The Times of Israel that the claim was a “feverish dream.”
Although the White House and the State Department didn’t respond to Reason‘s request for comment, they both told S
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