The Times of Israel is liveblogging Wednesday’s events as they happen.
White House: Biden earmarked $50M for Gaza condoms; Biden official calls claim a ‘feverish dream’
The White House claims the previous administration had earmarked $50 million for a condom distribution program in the Gaza Strip, but does not offer evidence to back up the claim, which a former senior Biden official dismisses as a “feverish dream.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says the expenditure was discovered in Trump’s first week including by the new Department of Government Efficiency led by tech billionaire Elon Musk.
Musk’s initiative and the budget office “found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza,” Leavitt tells her debut press conference.
“That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money,” she says.
Andrew Miller, who served as deputy assistant secretary for Israeli-Palestinian affairs under former US president Joe Biden, calls the claim “outlandish.”
“It’s possible that $50 million is put aside for sexual health or something of that nature, which would include gynecology and many other services, but definitely not condoms alone,” he tells The Times of Israel.
The US Agency for International Development’s spending on injectable contraceptives, contraceptive implants, IUDs, male condoms, oral contraceptives, Standard Days Method and female condoms amounted to $60 million in the fiscal year of 2023, and that was across the globe — not just Gaza.
Condoms generally cost less than one dollar each in the United States and much less in bulk. Just over two million people live in Gaza, nearly all of which has been heavily damaged in the 15-month war with Israel.
Man shot dead in northern city of Zarzir
A man in his 40s was shot dead in the northern city of Zarzir tonight, according to the police and medics.
According to local Arabic-language media, the victim’s name is Abdel-Moneim Jandawi.
First responder Amir Elisha says his team “saw the injured man unconscious, without a pulse and not breathing with penetrating wounds on his body” and eventually declared him dead at the scene.
Police have opened an investigation into the shooting and say the circumstances were criminal rather than terror-related.
Since the start of 2025, 18 Arab Israeli citizens have been killed in violent incidents, amid a years-long epidemic of crime in the community.
Ex-hostage Soussana credits Liri Albag with saving her life as captors tortured, threatened her
Amit Soussana, a hostage kidnapped to Gaza on October 7, 2023, and freed in a hostage deal in November of that year, says fellow captive Liri Albag, who was released on Saturday after 477 days, saved her life by convincing their terrorist captors that she, Soussana, was not an IDF officer.
In an interview with Channel 12’s “Uvda” investigative program, Soussana, 40, says the captors bound her hands and legs together while one beat her with a stick and the other threatened her with a sharp metal object, and demanded that she admit being in the military, claiming they had seen as such on TV.
She says the captors brought other hostages, including Albag, to ask her to come clean.
A guard told her, “You have 40 minutes to tell us the truth, or else I kill you,” while pointing a gun at her head, she says.
She says Albag talked to the guard and managed to persuade the captors that Soussana wasn’t in the military.
“I told her when she came back: ‘I don’t know if they would have killed me or not; as far as I’m concerned, you saved my life.'”
Soussana also says that in the first three weeks of her captivity, she was kept alone in an apartment with two guards who tied her legs with a metal chain and with two locks to a window, “like an animal.”
She again recounts the sexual assault she endured by one of the captors, a story she first revealed in an interview with The New York Times last year.