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February 12, 2025 | 06:12 pm
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Billionaire Elon Musk, head of the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), admitted on Tuesday to spreading a hoax about Washington allegedly planning to send a US$50 million shipment of condoms to the Gaza Strip, Palestine.
"First of all, some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected," Musk told reporters in the Oval Office when asked about fact-checking reports that millions of dollars were earmarked towards the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases in the Gaza Province of Mozambique.
"We will make mistakes, but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes," he said, as quoted by Anadolu.
"I’m not sure we should be sending $50 million worth of condoms to anywhere. Frankly, I’m not sure that’s something Americans would be really excited about. And that is really an enormous number of condoms," Musk said.
"If it went to Mozambique instead of Gaza…okay, that's not as bad. But why are we doing that?" he said.
His comments followed claims by U.S. President Donald Trump, who earlier this month stated that his administration had “identified and stopped US$50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.”
The false claim was initially made by White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt in her first press conference. She said the DOGE and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) led by Musk had found “that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.”
However, Leavitt did not provide evidence to support the claim.
A review of publicly available USAID data from 2007 to 2023 contradicts this claim, revealing no records of condom shipments to Gaza. The only shipment to the Middle East during that period was a US$45,680 supply sent to Jordan in 2023, the first recorded shipment to the region since 2019.
According to the grant database of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation in Mozambique received over US$83 million in funding since 2021 for reproductive health projects in two provinces: Inhambane and Gaza.
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