Trump made the remarks in a television interview. "We've already agreed that by the end of this year we won't be paying Israel. Now we'll help Israel if they need it," he said. He argued that Israel doesn't need the aid, called the country "very prosperous," and said it remains the US's "priority number one." Israel, he said, can buy whatever weapons it wants, as can Europe. The plan would replace direct aid with Israeli purchases of American military hardware. Accounts of the timing differ: some reports have Trump saying payments stop at the end of this year, others say the aid ends starting in 2027.

Trump said the talks with Netanyahu went on for "a couple of years," and that the initiative came from Netanyahu himself. He also said the aid has become a political weapon. "The left uses the $4 billion payment that everybody knows about... as a signal of unfairness, and we can't allow that to happen," he said. He pointed to Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan and a critic of the aid, and to far-right commentators such as Tucker Carlson. A June Quinnipiac poll found 48% of voters and 66% of Democrats saying the US is too supportive of Israel, up from 16% and 20% in 2017.

Current aid flows under a 10-year memorandum of understanding signed under President Barack Obama, worth $38 billion, or about $3.8 billion a year. Most reports put its end date at 2028, though Israeli officials told one outlet it does not expire until the end of 2027. It includes $3.3 billion a year in foreign military financing and $500 million for cooperative missile defense. Those funds must largely be spent on American-made weapons, so US defense contractors could feel the effect if aid stops without matching direct purchases. Israel has received more than $300 billion in US assistance since 1948. Its defense budget hit a record 110 billion shekels ($29 billion) in 2025, with aid a shrinking share of it.

In Israel, officials were reportedly caught off guard. Finance Ministry officials said they had received no formal document from the Prime Minister's Office, and Defense Ministry officials said they had expected a gradual wind-down. The Defense Ministry did confirm that talks have begun on replacing the current agreement with a framework built around joint investment in research, development and weapons production. It described this as a shift toward a "more reciprocal partnership."

The idea of change was not new. Netanyahu said in a May CBS interview that he wanted to wean Israel off US military support within a decade, and in a June letter to a US congressman he wrote that it is time for Israel to "move from aid recipient to partner." A Congressional Research Service report in July said officials were discussing a possible shift after 2028 from direct aid to joint programs. What Trump described is a faster timeline than Netanyahu has publicly laid out.

Opposition figures objected to both the substance and the way it came out. Gadi Eisenkot said that learning of strategic changes through the media shows a "real danger" in Netanyahu's conduct, and he demanded Netanyahu answer to Israeli citizens that evening. Yair Golan, a leader of the opposition bloc and a former deputy military chief, called the end of aid a "severe blow to Israel's security" at a time of fighting on multiple fronts, and said it would place the "burden of funding defense needs... entirely upon the Israeli public."