Fact Check: Texas City Did NOT Require Residents To Sign 'Israel Loyalty Pledge' To Get 2025 Flood Relief Funds

Fact Check

  • by: Alan Duke
Fact Check: Texas City Did NOT Require Residents To Sign 'Israel Loyalty Pledge' To Get 2025 Flood Relief Funds Old, Retracted

Did a Texas city require residents to sign an "Israel loyalty pledge" in order to be eligible to get relief funds after deadly floods in 2025? No, that's not true: There is no evidence that any Texas town or county impacted by the deadly flooding of July 2025 established any such loyalty pledge. The meme making the claim did not name the city, but it echoed a real attempt by Dickinson, Texas, to require a pledge to not boycott Israel for relief funding in the wake of Hurricane Harvey in 2017. That requirement was retracted after a legal challenge.

The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on July 9, 2025. The post read:

🚨🇺🇸🇮🇱 BREAKING: A Texas city has required residents to sign an "ISRAEL LOYALTY PLEDGE" to be eligible for relief funds after DEADLY FLOODS.

This is what the post looked like at the time of writing:

Screenshot 2025-07-09 125811.png

(Source: screenshot of X.com by Lead Stories)

The flooding over the July 4 holiday caused death and destruction in Kerr, Travis, Kendall, Burnet, Williamson, and Tom Green counties. Lead Stories could find no indication that any local governments in that area were making relief funding contingent on a pledge relating to Israel.

No evidence-based "Breaking" reports corroborate the July 2025 claim that a loyalty pledge was forced on survivors of the Independence Day Weekend floods along the Guadalupe River. Lead Stories searched Google News and Yahoo! News for the key words Texas AND Israel AND ''Loyalty Pledge" - Harvey -2017 -Dickinson. Google News' index of thousands of news sites found no such matches. Yahoo!'s self-described index of "a diverse network of news partners and providers" turned up only examples from a 2017 loyalty pledge controversy.

The seed of this claim may be from a previous disaster in Texas. Dickinson, Texas, officials did initially require residents applying for help after Hurricane Harvey hit the town in August 2017, to sign a statement promising not to participate in a boycott of Israel. The officials justified the requirement by citing a Texas law that barred the state from doing business with any contractors that boycott Israel. Dickinson dropped the requirement after a lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in October 2017.

Dickinson is south of Houston, about 300 miles from the 2025 flooding.

Want to inform others about the accuracy of this story?

See who is sharing it (it might even be your friends...) and leave the link in the comments.:


  Alan Duke

Editor-in-Chief Alan Duke co-founded Lead Stories after ending a 26-year career with CNN, where he mainly covered entertainment, current affairs and politics. Duke closely covered domestic terrorism cases for CNN, including the Oklahoma City federal building bombing, the UNABOMBER and search for Southeast bomber Eric Robert Rudolph. CNN moved Duke to Los Angeles in 2009 to cover the entertainment beat. Duke also co-hosted a daily podcast with former HLN host Nancy Grace, "Crime Stories with Nancy Grace" and hosted the podcast series "Stan Lee's World: His Real Life Battle with Heroes & Villains." You'll also see Duke in many news documentaries, including on the Reelz channel, CNN and HLN.

Read more about or contact Alan Duke

About Us

EFCSN International Fact-Checking Organization

Lead Stories is a fact checking website that is always looking for the latest false, misleading, deceptive or inaccurate stories, videos or images going viral on the internet.
Spotted something? Let us know!.

Lead Stories is a:


WhatsApp Tipline

Have a tip or a question? Chat with our friendly robots on WhatsApp!

Add our number +1 (404) 655-4223, follow this link or scan the image below with your phone:

@leadstories

Subscribe to our newsletter

* indicates required

Please select all the ways you would like to hear from Lead Stories LLC:

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. For information about our privacy practices, please visit our website.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices here.

Most Read

Most Recent

Share your opinion