In light of recent developments across the Middle East and North Africa, increasing attention has been paid to the evolving tactics, geographies, and technologies of war, especially in light of trends toward drone warfare. Most studies of late-modern war however have tended to theorize war in terms of unmitigated “geopolitical excess,” whether unbridled military force as seen in the U.S. invasion of Iraq, torture in Guantanamo or “targeted killings” in Yemen, Pakistan, and beyond. Rarely is war considered within the remit of development and humanitarian technologies, discourses, and practices. Drawing on Foucault’s prescient observation that the institutions of liberal modernity are themselves invested with the force of war, this paper traces the deepening entanglements between liberal war, colonial violence, and civilian intervention in Palestine. Based on research conducted in the West Bank on the U.S. Agency for International Development and the vast web of aid intermediaries, experts, lawyers, and contractors through which it operates, this paper attends to the ways in which tactics of war and liberal counterinsurgency are proliferating through networks, institutions, and administrative bodies entrusted with administering civilian aid to the Palestinian population. Centrally this paper argues that the foreign aid regime which has emerged over the last half century in the West Bank and Gaza has served to mitigate the effects of military occupation and dispossession while further extending a regime of colonial governance into ever-more intimate spaces of Palestinian everyday life. It so follows, this paper contends, that liberal aid intervention in Palestine constitutes the means through which colonial war is both mitigated and maintained. The paper begins by contextualizing American aid within the broader nexus of political and security forces that shape aid allocation to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, tracing in particular the specific linkages between USAID and liberal counterinsurgency. Then turning to debates circulating within Palestine, it examines how those living in the West Bank and Gaza are negotiating the military-humanitarian complexes that have come to govern their lives. In so doing, this paper brings to the fore the persistence of war in moments when direct military violence is held in abeyance. More broadly it asks what the case of Palestine might tell us about other sites across the Middle East where war as such has been declared officially over.