White House press secretary Caroline Leavitt announced in her first press conference that the Trump administration has frozen $50 million in federal funds for "condoms in Gaza."

The Office of Management and Budget and the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency “found that there was approximately $50 million of taxpayer money spent to fund condoms in Gaza, and that this is a ridiculous waste of taxpayer money,” Levat told reporters. “That’s what this stop is about: being good stewards of tax dollars.”

Levitt did not provide further details and the account could not immediately be independently verified.

Condoms generally cost less than $1 each in the United States and much less wholesale. More than two million people live in Gaza, almost all of which was damaged by the Israeli war of extermination that destroyed almost the entire Gaza Strip.

But Andrew Miller, a former US deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli-Palestinian affairs, denied this. “The Biden administration did not spend $50 million on condoms for Gaza,” he wrote on his X account.

"Either the White House can't read a simple spending schedule, or it's lying," he added.

US President Donald Trump has ordered a broad freeze on foreign aid and local grant programs in what the White House said was an effort to align federal spending with the administration's agenda under the Department of Local Government and the Office of Management and Budget.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommends that travelers to “Israel, including the West Bank and Gaza” bring “latex condoms” with them “to prevent illness or injury.” (The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services webpage was last updated on August 5, 2024.)

Israel claims that in 2020, Hamas used helium-filled condoms to send firebombs into Israel.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered a halt to nearly all US foreign aid on Friday, except for funding to Israel and Egypt, according to an internal memo.

The memorandum excludes emergency food aid.

Levitt also said the United States was on the verge of disbursing $37 million to the WHO before Trump announced his withdrawal from the UN body.

For his part, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expressed his concern about the freeze on aid by the United States, which has long been the world's largest provider of development aid in absolute dollar terms.