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Every year, the United States sends $3.8 billion in weapons to Israel—more than it gives any other country. When Israel announced in late January 2026 that it would reopen the Gaza-Egypt border crossing at Rafah after nearly two years of closure, the situation showed a hard truth about how leverage works—and how little the aid relationship has done to influence Israeli policies that affect Palestinian movement and humanitarian access.
The Rafah crossing represents the only route through which Palestinians in Gaza can reach the outside world without passing through Israeli-controlled checkpoints. When Israeli forces seized control of the crossing in May 2024 during operations in the city, they closed the last exit that wasn’t subject to Israeli security screening. The crossing stayed shut for twenty months while Gaza descended into famine conditions.
Israel agreed to reopen it only after receiving the remains of the last deceased Israeli hostage held by Hamas, and only under terms that preserve Israeli control over who passes through. The crossing will handle pedestrian traffic exclusively—no goods, no humanitarian supplies, no bulk movement of anything except individual people. Those seeking to cross will face Israeli security screening using facial recognition technology, strict daily quotas, and the understanding that Israeli forces can seal the gate whenever they determine security requires it.
This is what $3.8 billion in annual aid buys in terms of influence over border policy: a partial reopening, on Israeli terms, after nearly two years of closure during a humanitarian catastrophe.
Where the Money Goes
The $3.8 billion comes from an agreement signed during the Obama administration in 2016—the third such ten-year agreement between the two countries. Israel has received more U.S. aid than any other country since 1948, with over $300 billion in inflation-adjusted assistance across nearly eight decades.
Nearly all of it flows through weapons channels. The United States provided Israel substantial economic assistance until 2007. Now the money breaks down into two categories: $3.3 billion annually through a program that lets Israel buy American weapons, and $500 million to co-develop missile defense systems together.
The missile defense commitment is unique. Other countries receiving U.S. aid must purchase American-produced systems. Israel gets to build and manufacture these systems itself.
After Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, Congress approved at least $16.3 billion in supplemental aid beyond the regular $3.8 billion baseline—$8.7 billion in April 2024 alone, with additional appropriations following. By May 2025, the Israeli Defense Ministry reported that the United States had delivered ninety thousand tons of arms and equipment on eight hundred transport planes and 140 ships since the start of the conflict.
The recipients of these weapons include 33 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, making Israel the first foreign nation to operate this fifth-generation stealth aircraft. The country uses advanced air defense systems, precision-guided munitions, helicopter gunships, and sophisticated intelligence platforms. The vast majority of casualties in Gaza have come from airstrikes rather than ground operations, which means U.S.-supplied aircraft and munitions have been central to the campaign that created the humanitarian crisis.
Why Rafah Matters Differently
Gaza has three physical crossings to the outside world. Two are in the north—Erez and Beit Hanoun—and one is in the south at Kerem Shalom. All three are controlled by Israel and designed primarily for goods movement and limited humanitarian access, not for routine civilian travel.
Rafah is the only crossing that connects Gaza directly to Egypt, which means it’s the only route Palestinians could historically use to reach the broader Arab world without Israeli security screening. It represented the one place where Palestinians had some degree of autonomy over their own movement.
A 2005 agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, negotiated with U.S. support and European Union monitoring, established Rafah as an internationally supervised crossing where the Palestinian Authority managed the Gaza side while Egypt handled the Egyptian side, with EU monitors providing neutral oversight. The arrangement lasted until 2007 when Hamas took control of Gaza, after which operations became sporadic and eventually ceased.
When Israeli forces captured Rafah in May 2024, the stated goal was preventing arms smuggling by Hamas. The consequence was trapping approximately 42,000 Gazans who had left during the conflict seeking treatment or attempting to reach safety through dual citizenship. Egypt shares a long border with Gaza but couldn’t unilaterally reopen the crossing without Israeli permission. The crossing sits in territory under Israeli control—a fact that crystallizes who holds power over Palestinian movement.
The Legal Framework Nobody Enforces
American law establishes multiple ways the United States could condition aid to Israel on humanitarian standards. The U.S. has rarely used these rules.
The Humanitarian Aid Corridor Act states: “No assistance shall be furnished under this chapter or the Arms Export Control Act to any country when it is made known to the President that the government of such country prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance.” The President can ignore this rule if they decide national security is at stake, but must publicly explain why and tell Congress. This statute would seem directly applicable when Israel restricts humanitarian access to Gaza, yet the provision has never been invoked to restrict aid to Israel.
President Biden issued an order in February 2024 requiring countries receiving U.S. aid and engaged in active armed conflict to provide written assurances that they would follow international rules about protecting civilians and wouldn’t arbitrarily restrict U.S. humanitarian assistance.
Israel provided those assurances in March 2024. The State Department reported in May that it found the assurances “credible and reliable”—while simultaneously acknowledging in the same report that there was reasonable basis to assess that U.S. defense articles had been used “in instances inconsistent with its international humanitarian law obligations or with established best practices for mitigating civilian harm.”
A third mechanism is a law that says the U.S. can’t give weapons to units that commit serious human rights abuses unless the host government takes effective steps to bring the responsible persons to justice. The same rule applies to every country that gets U.S. weapons—with one documented exception.
The State Department created a special review process for Israeli units that applies different standards than to units from any other country. For other countries, permanent State Department staff make these decisions based on the law. Israeli units need approval from a political appointee instead. The Israeli government gets up to 90 days to respond to vetting inquiries, compared to significantly shorter timeframes for other countries, and Israel gets to formally respond and argue its case in ways not granted to other countries.
Thousands of units from other countries have been denied assistance under this law over the decades. Israel and Saudi Arabia stand alone in never having had a single unit denied assistance under this statute, despite serious documented human rights abuses by Israeli forces in the West Bank and Gaza.
What Closure Meant
In July 2025, a UN group of food security experts issued an alert warning that “the worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in Gaza Strip.” The alert identified two of three famine thresholds as having been reached: plummeting food consumption and severe malnutrition rates that have surged to catastrophic levels.
Nearly one in five children under five in Gaza City is acutely malnourished. Severe malnutrition rates tripled in one month during mid-2025 to make Gaza City the worst-hit area in the Strip. In Khan Younis and central Gaza, malnutrition rates doubled in less than one month during that same period.
Of 74 malnutrition-related deaths documented in 2025, 63 occurred in July alone, including 24 children under five. The World Health Organization documented that since May 27, 2025, more than 1,516 Palestinians have been killed and more than 10,000 injured while attempting to reach food supplies at distribution sites or along humanitarian aid convoy routes.
The closure eliminated one avenue through which Palestinians with financial resources could leave for treatment, trapping patients with treatable conditions inside a territory where services have been catastrophically disrupted. It symbolized the absolute control over all movement in and out of the territory—a control that extends to determining which humanitarian goods enter, in what quantities, through which crossings, and along which routes.
The Politics of Partial Reopening
Israel agreed to reopen Rafah as part of Trump’s peace negotiations and intensive diplomatic engagement surrounding hostage returns. According to Israeli government statements, the country agreed only after Hamas returned the remains of the last deceased Israeli hostage, Ran Gvili.
The terms are restrictive. Pedestrian traffic only. No goods, no humanitarian supplies, no bulk movement of rebuilding materials. People leaving Gaza will be checked by EU and Palestinian Authority officials while Israeli forces watch from a distance using facial recognition to verify that only approved individuals pass through. Israeli officers can close or open the crossing whenever they want.
Those seeking to enter Gaza from Egypt face more rigorous screening, including Israeli security screening at an IDF checkpoint after passing through the crossing, with X-ray machines and facial recognition technology deployed to prevent unauthorized individuals from returning. Israel decides how many people can cross each day. Only people who left during the war can come back—not Palestinians who want to return from living abroad.
Israel says these rules are needed to stop Hamas leaders from escaping. They also reflect Israel’s refusal to give up control over who can leave even under significant international pressure.
Why Leverage Doesn’t Work the Way Numbers Suggest
When Congress or the Biden administration raised the possibility of conditioning aid, Israeli officials said Israel needs to protect itself and faces threats to Israel’s survival. Netanyahu’s government has shown remarkable willingness to publicly disagree with the U.S. administration on aid and policy issues. Israeli politicians who accept conditions on aid face criticism at home.
Within the U.S. political system, both Republicans and Democrats support Israel, making it hard for administrations to implement aid restrictions without facing domestic political backlash.
The Trump administration stopped trying to attach conditions to the aid. In February 2025, the administration canceled Biden’s order that required transparency about how weapons are used. A spokesperson stated that the previous administration had “imposed baseless and politicized conditions on assistance to Israel at a time when our close ally was fighting a war of survival on multiple fronts against Iran and terror proxies.” By removing the requirement for Israel to report on how it uses weapons, the Trump administration removed one of the few ways Congress could check what Israel was doing.
In 1991, President George H.W. Bush refused to give Israel $10 billion in loan guarantees in response to continued settlement expansion in occupied Palestinian territories. Americans criticized the move, and it may have cost Bush the 1992 election. Two years later, President Bill Clinton ran to Bush’s right on Israel policy and reversed the aid restriction. Presidents who attempt to condition aid to Israel face domestic political consequences that may exceed what the U.S. would gain by attaching conditions.
In 2023 and 2024, senators tried to add a requirement that countries receiving weapons follow international rules about protecting civilians. Both Democrats and Republicans expressed concern about civilian deaths in Gaza. But Israel’s supporters in Congress blocked the amendments.
What the Reopening Achieves
The reopening Israel announced on January 31, 2026, gives some Palestinians a way to leave Gaza—an outcome for people with urgent needs and family members abroad. It signals that intense international pressure can change how Israel handles borders.
But the limited nature—pedestrian traffic only, with strict Israeli security controls, limited daily quotas, and restrictions on who can return—reflects that international pressure has limits when one country controls everything. For the 42,000 Palestinians who fled Gaza, the reopening might let them go home, but only if Israel approves them and only through a process that gives Israeli officials final say over who can cross.
For aid groups trying to fight the famine and disease in Gaza, the reopening doesn’t get more food or medicine into Gaza, since it’s limited to pedestrian movement. The Kerem Shalom checkpoint has been open since the October 2025 ceasefire, letting through about 400 trucks of supplies a day. The World Food Programme says Gaza needs at least 50 trucks of food every single day, and humanitarian groups say not enough supplies are getting through to prevent famine.
The Unresolved Question
The reopening raises but doesn’t answer whether America should threaten to stop sending weapons to force Israel to follow humanitarian rules and ensure Israel follows international rules about protecting civilians and lets aid in.
The law seems to allow the U.S. to attach conditions to the aid. Section 620I explicitly prohibits aid to countries restricting humanitarian assistance. The Leahy Law explicitly prohibits aid to security force units committing gross human rights violations. NSM-20 explicitly required assurances regarding humanitarian law compliance.
In practice, the U.S. has almost never used these tools. Israel gets special treatment—easier reviews, more time to respond, and approval from higher-level officials.
Some experts say the U.S. shouldn’t attach conditions to the aid. They say Israel faces threats and that Hamas hides among civilians, which causes unintended deaths, and that the U.S. needs Israel as an ally in the Middle East. Other experts say that if there’s no punishment for breaking international rules, Israel will keep breaking them. They point out that Israel gets special treatment that other countries don’t get, which shows that America cares less about human rights when it’s a close ally, which makes other countries doubt America’s commitment to human rights.
The Trump administration decided to keep giving weapons to Israel without any conditions. By canceling the requirement for Israel to report on how it uses weapons, the administration made clear that it won’t attach conditions to aid for Israel.
The $3.8 billion is real. The weapons it purchases are real. The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is real. The reopening shows that even without conditions, pressure from other countries can change Israeli policy. But it also shows that without real punishment, America has less power over Israel than the $3.8 billion figure implies.
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