A $140 million headline went viral. We pulled the IRS filings, profiled the accuser, and walked the structural trap every charity in Gaza is standing in. The truth is more complicated than either side says — and more useful.
$140 million.
That was the number. $140 million in Mormon charity money, allegedly funneled to organizations tied to Hamas. It is the kind of number that is designed to make you feel something before you understand anything. So we set out to understand it.
In January 2026, the Middle East Forum — a Philadelphia-based policy organization — published a report alleging that charities connected to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had transferred $140.6 million to Islamic organizations with documented ties to Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other designated terrorist groups. MEF Report
The story moved fast. Amy Mek amplified it. JNS ran it. Israel365 News and the RAIR Foundation ran it. And a church most people associate with missionaries in white shirts and family home evening was suddenly being accused of bankrolling terror.
On February 13, 2026, the Church responded through its Newsroom, calling the report false. Church Account On March 23, the Middle East Forum published a follow-up: same data, expanded allegations, sharper language. MEF Report
So who is right? Both of them. And neither of them. Because the truth lives in the details that nobody wants to sit with.
The $140 million did not move through a single pipe. It flowed through three different channels — and the difference between them is the difference between the headline and the truth.
Globus Relief and Lifting Hands International are run by Church members. But the Church does not control them, does not direct them, and does not appoint their boards. They are independent American charities that happen to have been founded by Latter-day Saints — which makes attributing their grants to the Church roughly like blaming the Catholic Church for what a Catholic businessman does with his foundation, or blaming the Methodists for whatever a Methodist hospital chooses to fund. Verified
Of the $140.6 million headline, the Church's own confirmed direct funding is approximately $2.1 million. That is 1.5 percent.
Here is the other thing the headlines erased: across all three channels, the overwhelming majority of the donations were not cash. They were bandages. Syringes. Surgical gloves. Donated pharmaceuticals. Surplus hospital equipment. In-kind goods.
And you do not have to take our word for it, because it is on the public record. Every American nonprofit that grants more than $5,000 to another organization must report it on IRS Form 990 Schedule I — which requires two separate columns: cash grants and non-cash assistance. Pull Globus Relief's filings and the cash column is nearly empty. The non-cash column is where the $119 million lives. Verified
Globus Relief's entire model is collecting surplus medical supplies from American hospitals and redistributing them through roughly 850 partner charities in 160 countries, with overhead under one percent.
Does in-kind aid eliminate all risk? No. Supplies have value; they can be resold or seized. Those are legitimate concerns, and we do not wave them away. But the difference between shipping bandages and wiring cash is enormous — and the headlines erased that distinction entirely.
You can't buy rockets with bandages.
So far, so good for the Church. But none of this means there are no real questions. Because here is where it gets complicated.
Those supplies went to intermediary organizations — legal American 501(c)(3) charities that file taxes, keep offices in U.S. cities, and appear on no U.S. terrorist designation list. Organizations like Islamic Relief, MedGlobal, and Rahma Worldwide. The allegations concern what sits downstream of them: personnel connections and partner connections to groups that are genuinely troubling.
So the donations did not go to Hamas. They went to organizations that went to organizations that have connections to people who have connections to Hamas. That is not the same thing. But it is also not nothing.
And there is one subset the Church has not addressed: the $2.1 million that LDS Charities granted directly to MedGlobal — $200,000 in 2017 and $1.9 million in 2019. That is not Globus Relief's money or Lifting Hands' money. That is the Church's own humanitarian arm choosing to fund an organization whose founder publicly references his friendship with the man who now leads the Church, and which operates through Hamas's health ministry. That is not terrorism. That is a relationship that requires explanation — and so far, the Church has not given one. Verified
In journalism, the source matters as much as the claim. The Middle East Forum was founded in 1990 by Daniel Pipes — a Harvard-educated historian who has taught at Chicago, Harvard, and the U.S. Naval War College, served in five U.S. administrations, and received a contested recess appointment from President George W. Bush to the U.S. Institute of Peace. MEF's projects include Campus Watch, Islamist Watch, and the Israel Victory Project, which advocates ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through Palestinian capitulation rather than negotiation. That last one tells you something about where MEF sits.
Here is the credibility case and the criticism case, side by side — because both are real.
Credibility
Criticism
What do we do with that? What journalists are supposed to do: separate the data from the framing. The IRS filings are real. The government designations are real. That data stands on its own merits. But calling The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints a "top benefactor of Islamist extremism" is not data — it is framing. And it is doing far more work than the evidence supports.
To understand why this story is bigger than one church, you need to know the name Mohammad El-Halabi.
For eleven years, El-Halabi was World Vision's director of operations in Gaza — food distribution, medical programs, children's services, inside one of the most respected aid agencies on Earth, a Christian organization with $3.5 billion in annual revenue and entire departments of auditors. In 2022, an Israeli court convicted him of diverting tens of millions of dollars to Hamas. In 2025, Hamas traded him back in a hostage exchange. Verified
We should be honest about what is contested here, because our standard is to steelman everything. The conviction rested substantially on classified evidence; UN human rights experts criticized the trial; and independent reviews commissioned by World Vision and by the Australian government reported finding no evidence that funds were diverted. El-Halabi maintained his innocence throughout. Contested
But notice: the lesson survives either reading. If El-Halabi was guilty, then Hamas infiltrated one of the best-resourced, most heavily audited humanitarian organizations in the world for over a decade. If he was innocent, then a respected aid agency spent years accused, prosecuted, and reputationally devastated over operations in Gaza anyway. Either way, the conclusion is the same: nobody operating in Gaza is immune. Nobody.
Since 2007, Hamas has controlled every functioning institution inside Gaza: the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Education, social welfare, border crossings, tax collection, sewage, electricity. So when the Middle East Forum says MedGlobal works "with the Ministry of Health in Gaza" — yes, that is true. But there is no non-Hamas Ministry of Health. If you want to vaccinate children in Gaza, you coordinate with Hamas's health ministry. If you want to feed two million civilians during a war, you cross Hamas-controlled checkpoints.
Every organization delivering aid in Gaza operates under this constraint: the United Nations, the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, Catholic Relief Services, World Central Kitchen, Lutheran World Relief, even direct U.S. government humanitarian aid. Every single one. This is not a Mormon problem. It is a structural problem, and it has no clean solution.
Organizations in Gaza face a binary choice. Option A: refuse to operate, and leave two million civilians without food, medicine, or clean water. Option B: operate within the Hamas-controlled system, accept that some friction with Hamas infrastructure is unavoidable, and do your best to deliver aid to the people who need it. There is no Option C. Even Israel365 News — one of the outlets that originally amplified the MEF investigation — acknowledged this in a follow-up, calling it the "impossible dilemma."
The Church chose Option B. So did the UN. So did World Vision. So did every Christian denomination operating in Gaza for the last two decades. The question is not whether the Church made this choice. The question is whether it made the choice wisely — with adequate safeguards, and with enough transparency for its members to evaluate.
The Church's February 13 statement condemned terrorism, noted that the independent charities are not Church-controlled, and said Church-direct aid is project-specific and largely in-kind. All of that is true. Church Account
But what the statement did not say is just as revealing. It did not address the MedGlobal relationship. It did not address the documented connection between MedGlobal's founder and President Oaks. It did not address the Rahma Worldwide partnership that continued after October 7. It did not name the two independent charities that account for 98 percent of the headline figure. And it offered zero specific transparency measures going forward.
The Middle East Forum's follow-up made a sharp point here: the Church's response mirrors how World Vision responded before its own Gaza crisis broke open. On the substance, that comparison is not fair — World Vision faced allegations of an embedded operative running its Gaza office; the Church has legal intermediaries with downstream concerns. Those are not the same situation. But the playbook — blanket denial, no specifics, trust us — is identical. And it creates a vulnerability the Church does not need.
Here is something the Middle East Forum's report leaves out completely: the Church has one of the longest institutional ties to Israel of any Christian denomination on the planet.
Does that sound like an organization that wants to fund Hamas? It does not. And anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something other than the truth.
First, credit where it is due. The Church's humanitarian instinct is correct: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and healing the sick regardless of nationality, religion, or who governs the territory is Christ-like, full stop. The emphasis on in-kind donations over cash shows real awareness of diversion risk. The project-specific framework with legal intermediaries is, broadly, the right model. And $1.45 billion in total humanitarian spending in 2024 is real, life-saving work.
But when seventeen million members contribute tithing in faith, they are owed more than "trust us." Here is what we think the Church should do — not because we are critics, but because we think this is a Church that can lead.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is not a supporter of terrorism. But it has a transparency problem — and in a world where information moves faster than institutions can respond, transparency is not just good governance. It is self-defense. This is a Church that sent an apostle to dedicate Jerusalem 185 years ago, that built a campus overlooking the Old City, and that ships millions of dollars of medical supplies to suffering people without asking their religion first. That Church can lead on this. It should lead on this. And its seventeen million members deserve to know that it will.
Methodology & Sourcing Note
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