Speaking at the White House on Wednesday, Donald Trump boasted that his administration had “stopped $50m being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas”, doubling down on a claim first made by his press secretary which appears to be contradicted by the facts.
As the Guardian reported on Tuesday, a comprehensive report issued in September by the US Agency for International Development (USAid), not a penny of the $60.8m in contraceptive and condom shipments funded by the US in the past year went to Gaza. In fact, the accounting shows, there were no condoms sent to any part of the Middle East, and just one small shipment, $45,680 in oral and injectable contraceptives, was sent to the region, all of it distributed to the government of Jordan.
The claim was first made by White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, as she tried to justify Trump’s sweeping order to freeze federal funding by citing what she called important new research from Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (or Doge), a special group that Trump has created, and the office of management and budget (OMB).
“Doge and OMB also found that there was about to be 50m taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza,” Leavitt claimed. “That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money. So that’s what this pause is focused on: being good stewards of tax dollars.”
While Leavitt did not offer any evidence to support this claim, and did not immediately reply to a request for comment from the Guardian, the idea that the United States government planned to spend $50m to send condoms to Gaza quickly went viral, with an assist from Musk himself.
The Fox pundit Jesse Watters even claimed that the condoms were being used by Hamas militants as balloons to float explosives into Israel.
A review of the available evidence, however, suggests that the claim is almost certainly not true.
For the financial year 2023, the most recent for which data is available, only about $7m worth of condoms were distributed globally by USAid, and the vast majority of family-planning funds, 89%, were spent on programs in Africa.
No USAid funding for family planning was budgeted for Gaza.
In a thread on Musk’s social-media platform X, state department spokesperson Tammy Bruce cited, as “Example 1” of “unjustified and non-emergency spending” that had been blocked: “Condoms. Prevented $102 million in unjustified funding to a contractor in Gaza, including money for contraception.”
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Bruce told CNN the contractor that was supposed to get $102m is the International Medical Corps – a US-based organization that operates two field hospitals in Gaza. But the International Medical Corps posted a statement on its website detailing its emergency work in Gaza with this clear denial: “No US government funding was used to procure or distribute condoms.”
CNN also reported that experts on US aid to Gaza were baffled by the claim. “We have asked around, and no one is sure what this is referring to,” Steve Fake, a spokesperson for Anera, a non-profit that has partnered with USAid on a five-year, $50m health initiative in Gaza told the broadcaster.
Fake added that the Anera program has “definitely no purchase of condoms”.
As Dan Evon of the non-profit News Literacy Project pointed out in a comment on the USAid funding for family planning in other parts of the world: “It’s also worth noting that this is not a Biden program. Trump, too, spent funds on sending contraceptives around the globe. In 2019, about $40m was spent on contraceptives by the Trump administration.”
Article by:Source: Robert Mackey
