Trump says the US will end its $4 billion in annual military aid to Israel by the end of 2026

The morning of the midterms, a phone call to Fox News

On the morning Americans voted in the midterm elections, Tuesday 3 November, President Donald Trump telephoned Fox News's “Fox & Friends” and said the United States would stop paying Israel about $4 billion a year in military aid by the end of 2026. “As far as paying Israel, Bibi Netanyahu and I have made a deal, we give Israel $4 billion a year, we made a deal months ago that we're stopping,” Trump said. “They're fine with it because they've become a very successful country. They don't need it. And we won't be paying anymore, Israel.” He added one qualifier: “We'll help Israel if they need it.” Weapons sales would continue, he said; the grants would end. The timing was impossible to miss: Democrats had spent months attacking the aid as misplaced priorities, and his party was about to lose Congress.

The $3.8 billion agreement that runs to 2028

The money Trump described is governed by a memorandum signed in 2016 under Barack Obama: $38 billion over fiscal years 2019–2028; $3.8 billion a year, $3.3 billion in Foreign Military Financing and about $500 million for missile defence. Congress appropriates the funds annually, and the agreement does not expire until the end of September 2028. Netanyahu had raised ending the grants himself, on a very different timetable: in January 2026 he told The Economist he wanted to taper American aid to zero over a decade, and repeated it to CBS in May. Formal talks on a replacement framework began that month, centred on joint development and co-production rather than grants. What Netanyahu proposed was a transition; what Trump announced was a halt in under two months.

In Jerusalem, the announcement landed without warning. Finance Ministry officials told the Walla news site they were surprised, and no formal document had been submitted by the Prime Minister's Office. Three days later, on Friday 6 November, Netanyahu's office answered without denying Trump's account, posting that the move “from aid to partnership shows the strength and sophistication of our relationship”. President Isaac Herzog said the news had hit him “like a bolt out of the blue”. The US ambassador, Mike Huckabee, told Channel 12 he did not know whether funding would end at the close of 2026 or the end of 2028. Netanyahu, meanwhile, governs as caretaker after a deadlocked election stripped his bloc of its majority, as Magna Bureau reported when the new Knesset was sworn in. The Wall Street Journal reported a State Department letter to Congress putting about $10 billion still needed after 2028 for weapons orders already placed. In July, 103 House Democrats backed a failed measure from Republican Thomas Massie to cut off the aid entirely.

Is the cutoff real, and who pays for the orders already placed?

The largest unknown is whether the cutoff is a decision or a declaration. Trump offered no implementation plan, no timetable beyond “by the end of this year”, and no document; Netanyahu's office has published nothing formal. Nobody has said what happens to the roughly $10 billion in weapons orders already placed, or whether that money would come from loans, from Israel's own budget, or from a new arrangement. A second unknown is what “partnership” means in practice, joint weapons development, trade deals, intelligence sharing, which the two governments have not defined. A third is Congress. The memorandum runs to 2028, but Congress votes the money each year, and the Democrats taking both chambers in January have campaigned on conditioning or cutting the aid. Whether they legislate the cutoff, restore the money, or attach conditions is entirely open.

When the cheque stops, the leverage changes hands

The sums are not abstract. The United States supplied about 68 percent of Israel's imported major arms in 2021–25, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, with Germany supplying most of the rest. The $3.8 billion a year is worth roughly 12 billion shekels inside Israel's defence budget, and most of it is spent in the United States, on American-made weapons built by American workers. Ending it would not only cut Israel's budget; it would remove the instrument Washington has used for decades to shape Israeli decisions; the grants that bought a say in when wars start and how they are fought, and the diplomatic cover that came with them. For the United States, the announcement marks the moment a question once confined to the margins became a majority position, opposed now by the progressive wing of the Democrats and the America First wing of the Republicans alike. For the region, the message is that the most durable assumption in Middle Eastern security, that American money for Israel is automatic, no longer holds.

Two elections, one announcement, and a decade of drift

What makes 3 November different is that two elections arrived at once. In the United States, voters handed both chambers of Congress to a Democratic Party whose left flank had made the aid a campaign issue; and whose Michigan Senate candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, won his seat days after Trump singled him out by name over the $4 billion. In Israel, voters took away Netanyahu's majority six days earlier, leaving him a caretaker negotiating his survival while rival Gadi Eisenkot tries to build a government before 6 December. Trump spoke into that double vacuum, and the midterm defeat is already reshaping Washington: three top Justice Department officials resigned within two days of the vote. The announcement also has a history: Netanyahu's January proposal, the talks that began in May, and the slow accumulation of grievances, the Gaza war, the settlements, the war with Iran, that turned a bipartisan consensus into a contested question. A ten-year transition can be negotiated, budgeted and reversed. A two-month halt cannot, and the gap between the two timetables is where the confusion of the past week lives.

The builders, the buyers, and the neighbours are already recalculating

The first recalculation is industrial. Most of the $3.8 billion is spent in the United States, so American weapons makers have as much at stake as Israel's defence ministry, and a shift from grants to purchases would move the cost onto Israel's budget while keeping the orders in American factories. The second is Israeli: a state that builds some of the world's most advanced weapons will be pressed to do more of it alone, faster, and to find new suppliers, Germany, supplier of about 31 percent of its imported major arms in 2021–25, is the obvious first call. The third is regional. The Gulf states agreed a joint military command in Kuwait as the war with Iran redrew their defence maps, and Iran's threats have already pushed senior American officials onto military bases, as the Treasury chief's move to a base showed. The picture is a region arming itself for a world in which American guarantees are negotiable. And the fourth is political: a Democratic Congress with subpoena power arrives in January, and the aid question will be among its first tests.

What should we watch before the money actually stops?

Four dates will tell whether the announcement becomes policy. The first is 6 December, Eisenkot's deadline to form a government in Israel, extendable by two weeks, and whether Netanyahu survives as caretaker or is replaced. The second is the turn of the year, when the first payments under the memorandum fall due and the absence of a formal document becomes a decision in itself. The third is January 2027, when the new Democratic Congress takes its seats and decides whether to appropriate the money, condition it, or cut it. The fourth is the quiet one: the State Department's accounting of the roughly $10 billion in orders already placed, and whether anyone plans to pay for them. Until one of those dates produces a document, the $4 billion question remains what it was on 3 November; a sentence spoken on television, waiting for two governments to catch up with it.