Both President Trump and his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, have claimed that the administration has stopped a plan to spend $50 million on condoms for Gaza as part of the new administration’s reevaluation of federal funding.
“We identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas,” he said Wednesday. “They’ve used them as a method of making bombs.”
The U.S. Department of State said in 2021 that Hamas and other militant groups have a history of launching incendiary balloons toward Israel. Previous photos taken by The Associated Press in 2020 show masked men attaching incendiary devices to gas-filled condoms and balloons.
However, neither Trump nor officials in his administration have provided evidence of the program they are referring to or whether Hamas has used condoms as a weapon in its war with Israel. The Office of Management and Budget and the U.S. Agency of International Development (USAID) have not responded to questions from CBS News. Available figures from the State Department show that previous shipments for contraception, including condoms, to the Middle East cost far less than $50 million.
Without specifying whether she was referring to a program that included the $50 million figure, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said that a federal pause in foreign assistance included preventing $102 million in “unjustified funding” to a contractor in Gaza, “including money for contraception.”
In an email to reporters, Bruce added that the administration stopped $102 million in funding to the International Medical Corps for Gaza.
In a news release, the International Medical Corps, a global aid organization based in Los Angeles, responded that it has received about $68 million from USAID since Oct. 7, 2023, and has used the funding to operate two field hospitals in Gaza.
“No US government funding was used to procure or distribute condoms,” the organization’s statement said.
The latest available report online on contraceptives and condom shipments from USAID, from fiscal year 2023, states that the agency’s only shipment of contraceptives to the Middle East since fiscal year 2019 was made to Jordan and cost $45,680. The shipment contained injectable and oral contraceptives, not condoms.
According to USAID reports, shipments of contraceptives to the Middle East do not happen annually. In the decade before fiscal year 2023, there were only two shipments, including one in fiscal year 2019 and one in fiscal year 2013. In fiscal year 2019, USAID spent a total of $1.1 million on contraceptives for Yemen, with condoms comprising 4% of the total value.
It is unclear whether there were any planned contraceptive shipments to Gaza for fiscal year 2025. But the total value of all contraceptives shipped from the U.S. from USAID was $60 million in fiscal year 2023, which included shipments to 23 countries.
Layla Ferris
contributed to this report.
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