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By Sam Westrop, Middle East Forum

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) has seemingly refused to acknowledge or curtail its financing for Islamist groups credibly accused of involvement with designated terrorist organizations such as Hamas.

In an oblique response to the Middle East Forum’s January investigation into Mormon charitable involvement with terror-tied Islamist organizations, the LDS Church has now claimed Middle East Forum research “mischaracterized the humanitarian work of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Middle East.”

The Church declared, without responding directly to the allegations, that the Forum’s report is “false,” that “none of the organizations the report claims the Church funded directly are designated as supporters of terrorism or otherwise prohibited under U.S. law” and that “[t]here is no reason to believe the Church’s aid has been diverted from its intended use.”

However, new information uncovered by the Middle East Forum now reveals that the LDS Church’s support for extremist networks appears far more extensive than previously revealed. LDS Church support for extremists appears to have involved:

reported collaboration in 2020 with a Hamas government department in Gaza;

direct engagement on the ground in Gaza with a Hamas-contracted charity as recently as March 2026, years after media reported the group’s terror connections, and just months after published internal Hamas documents disclosed a top official of the charity was “affiliated” with the terror group;

funding of a prominent Hamas-controlled Gazan charity involved with the family of the late October 7 attacks architect, Ismail Haniyeh;

the provision, over the past two decades, of tens of millions of dollars of support for radical domestic Islamist charities with ties to violent foreign extremists.

Medglobal and Hamas’s Ministry of Health

In 2020, an LDS Church-funded charity named Medglobal claimed that LDS Charities (LDS Church’s humanitarian aid department) partnered with Hamas’s Ministry of Health, in collaboration with two other Islamist charities.

As Hamas documents gathered in Gaza and analyzed by NGO Monitor reveal, Hamas’s Ministry of Health serves as a key component in the terror group’s efforts to ensure international nonprofits operate “in line with Hamas’ security apparatus’ agenda and demands.”

Medglobal, an Illinois-based 501(c), has previously partnered with the Hamas authorities, explicitly promising to use donations in its “[work] with the Ministry of Health in Gaza.”

In addition, Medglobal advertises in Hamas-run Gazan newspapers such as Felesteen News.

Documents published by Medglobal in 2017 indicate that LDS Charities was the largest single donor to the charity with a $200,000 donation; and in 2019, LDS Charities was the sole listed 501(c) donor to Medglobal, with a transfer of over $1.9 million. In recent years, the Church has continued to support the charity.

Founded by Syrian-American activist Zaher Sahloul, Medglobal is particularly active in Gaza and Syria. Sahloul is the former president of the radical Hamas-aligned Mosque Foundation in Illinois.

Sahloul’s social media posts appear to demand Jews speak out against Israel or be considered complicit in violence against Palestinians.

Today, Sahloul and his charity associate with the new Islamist regime in Syria. Sahloul has published pictures of him with Asaad Hassan Al-Shaibani, the Syrian Islamist regime’s Foreign Minister and the founder of Al-Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch.

Other Medglobal staff include Hassan Aly, an Illinois imam who serves as Medglobal’s “director of community engagement and global partnerships.”

In a 2024 sermon at the Islamic Center of Detroit, as Israeli forces battled Hamas terrorists in Gaza, Aly called for an Islamic Jerusalem to prevail, and called on Allah to provide a “decisive and strengthening victory over your enemy and their enemy.”

Just a few months later, the Church invited Aly to address its interfaith conference in Chicago.

Medglobal head Zaher Sahloul boasts that he has known LDS President Dallin H. Oaks since 2012, publishing photos of their meetings in Salt Lake City.

Through Medglobal, LDS Charities is reported to have indirectly worked with other dangerous Islamist charities.

The partnership with Hamas’s Ministry of Health also reportedly included Islamic Oasis, an open supporter and collaborator with the murderous Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

In 2022, the Taliban government funded an Islamic Oasis project in Mehtar Lam, a city in Afghanistan’s Laghman province.

Islamic Oasis officials openly call for a theocratic state operating under sharia law. Islamic Oasis events include openly anti-Semitic discussions about the ostensible wickedness of “‘our Enemies’ the Jews” and their treatment of “goyim” and “Muslims.”

Islamic Oasis head Muhammed Shirazi praised the October 7 attacks by the “brave Mujahideen” against the “filth that occupies” Palestine.

 

LDS Charities has been listed by other Islamist charities as a collaborator on projects featuring Islamic Oasis on multiple occasions.

Rahma Worldwide

A second key radical organization involved with both LDS and Hamas’s ministries is Rahma Worldwide, a Michigan-based charity with close connections to two designated terrorist organizations.

Rahma has for many years enjoyed high-level relationships with senior terrorist leaders, admitting to partnering with Hamas’s “Ministry of Social Development, the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, the Ministry of Education, and the General Administration of Zakat.”

Senior Rahma officials have appeared in Hamas media alongside these terrorist leaders, including Hamas politburo member Ghazi Hamad, who, weeks after the October 7 attacks carried out by his movement, in which almost 1,200 Israelis were murdered, promised that Hamas would repeat the attacks “time and again until Israel is annihilated.”

The Hamas leader has been quoted praising the “depth of the ministry’s relationship with donor institutions such as Rahma.” Hamas published photos of Rahma’s top officials handing gifts to Hamad.

In 2021 and 2023, Rahma officials signed contracts with the Gaza’s ruling terror leaders, apparently to become an official Hamas charitable partner.

In 2023, Rahma worked with and accepted money from Kuwait’s Revival of Islamic Heritage Society (RIHS).

The U.S. Department of the Treasury designated RIHS in 2008, citing its support for Al-Qaeda, and its efforts to use “charity and humanitarian assistance as cover to fund terrorist activity and harm innocent civilians.”

In Gaza, Rahma’s involvement with RIHS was so intimate that the terrorist group’s logo was even sewn on to the jackets of Rahma officials and volunteers.

In December 2025, NGO Monitor uncovered internal Hamas documents from 2022 in which officials within the terror group’s “Ministry of Interior and National Security” declared that Rahma Worldwide’s Gazan Director is “affiliated with the Hamas movement.”

Rahma lists LDS Charities among its “significant donors and partners.” Meanwhile, LDS Church and Rahma have boasted of at least a dozen projects together over the past decade, with LDS supporting Rahma’s efforts in Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, Yemen and Türkiye.

Crucially, LDS Charities funding for and collaboration with Rahma has continued to take place after the first public reporting about Rahma’s overt connections to two different terrorist organizations.

The LDS Church’s 2025 “Caring Report” lists Rahma as a recipient of LDS donations.

And just this month, in March 2026, Rahma published video footage of a joint LDS-Rahma project in Syria.

Bayader Association for Environment and Development

Between 2014 and 2016, LDS Charities served as a donor to a Gaza charitable initiative handled through a Hamas affiliate in Gaza named the Bayader Association for Environment and Development.

Founded in 2007, shortly after Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip, Bayader boasts of operating in close cooperation with the Hamas terror regime.

The proxy’s 2021 annual report openly notes “coordination” and “meetings” with Hamas’s Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Works, Ministry of Social Affairs, and Ministry of Agriculture.

Bayader staff openly praise terrorists: in 2023, the group’s financial director, Abd Rabbo Saeed Abu Haddaf, publicly mourned the death of Ahmed Abu Deka, a senior terror operative for the designated group Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The official at this LDS beneficiary referred to this terror operative as a “brother and friend.”

In 2023, Bayader launched an event in Gaza with Islamic Relief, a Western Islamist charitable franchise established by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

Islamic Relief is another long-standing partner of the LDS Church. The 2023 Bayader event in Gaza featured senior terror leaders, including Hamas official Abdul Salam Haniyeh, son of the late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.

Conducted in collaboration with other Christian charities and Islamic Relief, the cost of the LDS-backed project with Bayader appeared to total approximately $3.2 million (based on the project’s reported average spend of $6,600 for 484 households), which included over $117,000 of untraceable direct cash grants to unnamed Gazan recipients.

As documented by governments and counter-terror experts, untraceable welfare funding operations carried out by Hamas proxy charities often not only serve to subsidize terror, but help terror groups recruit fighters and sanitize their operations.

As then solicitor-general, Elena Kagan, now on the Supreme Court, stated in 2010: “Hezbollah builds bombs. Hezbollah also builds homes. … When you help Hezbollah build homes, you are also helping Hezbollah build bombs.”

Muslim Aid

LDS Church has partnered and supported the radical U.K.-based charitable franchise Muslim Aid for over a decade. Just a few months ago, a Church initiative established fundraising portals for the radical charity in London.

Muslim Aid appears to be a Western charitable outgrowth of a violent South Asian Islamist movement named Jamaat-e-Islami.

In 2013, a Bangladeshi war crimes tribunal sentenced to death in absentia one of the charity’s founders, Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin, for his alleged role leading a Jamaat-e-Islami killing squad that abducted and murdered 18 people during the country’s 1971 Liberation War.

Counter-terrorism analyst Chris Blackburn writes that Muslim Aid’s Australian branch has supported jihadist-funding organizations in Indonesia; government agencies in Bangladesh included Muslim Aid’s branch in that country in a list of ten Islamic charities supporting Islamist terrorism; and Spanish authorities believe that Muslim Aid financed jihadists in Bosnia in the 1990s.

Muslim Aid has previously admitted to funding organizations controlled by the terrorist organization Hamas, including a grant of over $18,000 to the al-Ihsan Charitable Society, which is designated by the U.S. government as a sponsor of terrorism.

In Pakistan, meanwhile, the U.K. and Australian branch of Muslim Aid partner openly with Al-Khidmat, the “charitable” arm of Jamaat-e-Islami’s Pakistani arm.

Along with openly financing Hamas, Al-Khidmat also publicly works with Hizbul Mujahedeen, a designated terrorist group in the United States.

Other Muslim Aid officials have included Manazir Ahsan, a leading British Islamist who helped to coordinate Islamist riots in the UK against novelist Salman Rushdie over his book, The Satanic Verses [Source: Shenai Raif, “Prosecute Rushdie, Says Moslem Group,” Press Association, 19 September 1990]; and Iqbal Sacranie, another infamous British Islamist who said of Rushdie: “Death, perhaps, is a bit too easy for him.”

American Near East Refugee Agency (ANERA) and UNRWA

Another major LDS Charities partner is ANERA, a Washington D.C-based charity which has faced significant recent congressional scrutiny over its activities in Gaza.

ANERA is a long-standing partner of Hamas charitable proxies such as the Bayader Association for Environment and Development and Unlimited Friends Association.

ANERA also appears to coordinate its work in Gaza with Hamas’s Ministry of Social Development and Ministry of Public Works and Housing, collaborating with Hamas officials to “finalize and approve[] the selection of beneficiaries.”

NGO Monitor has uncovered 2021 documents in which Hamas’s security officials in Gaza refer to a ANERA employee, stating that he “used to work as an intelligence source for the brothers at Public Affairs [a unit within the Hamas Ministry of Interior and National Security].”

ANERA staff openly express violent ideas, without, it seems, censure from top charity officials. In 2014, Mousa Shawwa, ANERA’s “logistics coordinator,” endorsed a call on social media for God to “erase the Jews.”

Another ANERA employee, Ibrahim Zanoun, expressed praise for the Hamas “resistance” and warnings that Hamas will “soon broadcast a video threatening the Jews.”

Other ANERA staff have included Ibrahim Najjar, who expressed support for the “brave prisoners” in Israeli jails and venerates the Hamas founder Sheikh Yassin, posting pictures of the terrorist leader.

Another ANERA staff member in Gaza appeared to welcome the October 7 attacks against Israel.

For many years, ANERA has relied on LDS Charities as a major supporter. ANERA reports consistently list the Church’s charitable arm as an “in-kind partner,” while ANERA social media references years of partnerships with LDS in both Gaza and Lebanon.

As Hani Almadhoun, a former ANERA official, LDS Church scholarship beneficiary and Brigham Young University (BYU) advisory board member (and profiled alumni), has noted: “ANERA has partnered with the LDS Church on many projects.”

Almadhoun today works as Director of Philanthropy for UNRWA, the Palestine-focused United Nations agency in Gaza credibly accused of longstanding complicity with Hamas.

One recent report claims to have found some 490 UNRWA staff members involved with designated terrorist organizations or supportive of terrorist acts.

In the past, the LDS Church has provided significant support to UNRWA, including a major project together in Gaza in 2019.

As with all the other beneficiaries, and because of the Church’s refusal to publish details of its active partnerships and beneficiaries, we do not know if these relationships have since ended.

In 2024, referring to his own philanthropic efforts, Almadhoun claimed “the LDS philanthropy is very interested in this work.”

Jason Olson, a Church member, BYU alumnus and Brandeis PhD in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, has repeatedly expressed concerns about BYU’s links with Almadhoun. He told the Middle East Forum:

“I have a strong testimony of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but I’m asking my alma mater Brigham Young University to sever all ties with Hamas and UNRWA now, if such truly exists.”

Relief

LDS Church has also collaborated with the international Islamist franchise Islamic Relief for over twenty years, organizing joint events and sponsoring dozens of Islamic Relief projects, and producing fundraising videos together.

Islamic Relief is one of the most important Islamist financial institutions in the world, with branches, offices and affiliates in over 40 countries.

Prominent members of the Muslim Brotherhood established the charity, and leading Islamist activists continue to run the franchise today.

Designated as a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates, and with bank accounts shut down by UBS and HSBC, the German government has determined that Islamic Relief has “significant ties” to the Muslim Brotherhood, with a Swedish government report reaching similar conclusions.

British and Italian officials have investigated Islamic Relief’s hosting of radical preachers, and European media has extensively covered numerous examples of antisemitism and pro-terror rhetoric among top IRW officials.

Both the Egyptian and Tunisian governments have reportedly accused Islamic Relief of financing jihadists.

In 2020, the U.S. State Department warned about the “blatant and horrifying anti-Semitism and glorification of violence exhibited at the most senior levels of Islamic Relief Worldwide.”

The Netherlands also subsequently cut ties; and the Swedish government recently reportedly decided to end all funding of the organization.

Staff at Islamic Relief’s U.S. branch have included Khaled Lamada, who once circulated text on social media praising the “jihad” of the “Mujahidin” for “causing the Jews many defeats,” while another staff member, Yousef Abdullah, seemingly praised the killing of Jews, among other anti-Semitic remarks.

The full scale of LDS funding for Islamic Relief is not known, but in 2008, the Los Angeles Times reported:

“The Mormon Church has become the biggest contributor to Buena Park-based Islamic Relief, touted by its administrators as the West’s largest Muslim-based charity. Relief officials say the church has donated $20 million in goods and services since the 2004 tsunami, equal to about 20% of the charity’s annual budget.”

Two decades later, how many additional tens of millions of dollars have been handed over to this terror-aligned charity?

Opaque Finances

We repeatedly asked the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for information about its reported involvement with a Hamas ministry and Hamas contractors.

We also repeatedly asked this public charity to disclose its full list of partners and beneficiaries in terror-stricken areas of the world such as the Gaza Strip. We received no official response.

The Church does publish an annual “Caring Report,” which corroborates some of our findings here. But the information is incomplete, with scant financial information provided.

LDS Charities, which operates under the church’s welfare department, utilizes its parent organization’s 501(c) church status, which is exempt from filing a nonprofit 990 tax return, a document that requires aid organizations to disclose detailed breakdowns of beneficiaries and foreign expenditures.

At the very least, we know the Church is a billion-dollar industry: figures published by a Mormon third party estimate LDS Charities spent over $560 million in 2024 alone.

How much of this funding benefited extremists? Middle East Forum requests for LDS Church, a public charity, to provide lists of its beneficiaries and charitable partners, have been steadfastly ignored.

This enormous institution has no interest, it seems, in behaving transparently, even as its partners subsidize the work of extremists and killers.

Worse still, the example radical partnerships listed above are not even comprehensive. There is yet more to investigate.

For example, the Church’s website refers to its support for United Muslim Relief (UMR), an international aid charity currently led by Abed Ayoub, the former President of Islamic Relief’s U.S. branch.

UMR staff also include another former Islamic Relief official named Omar Shahin, who fundraised for the now-banned Hamas-financing Holy Land Foundation.

In 2002, Shahin preached: “You will keep on fighting with the Jews until the fight reaches the east of Jordan river then the stones and trees will say: oh Muslim, oh (servant) slaves of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him.”

In Gaza, UMR supports Hamas proxies and has advertised in Hamas newspapers.

Because of the LDS Church’s refusal to engage with media inquiries, and its failure to publish details of its tax-exempt activities in terror-stricken areas of the world, we may never know how much Mormon money may have been diverted to radical causes.

In its attack on the Middle East Forum’s January report, the LDS Church claims its humanitarian work “is guided by careful oversight and legal and operational safeguards.

Aid is provided for specific humanitarian purposes, is subject to review and accountability, and complies with all applicable laws.”

And yet such “careful oversight” appeared to include direct partnership both with terror authorities and their (publicly-disclosed) charitable deputies.

Whether the product of self-denial or deceit, LDS Church’s defensive rhetoric is familiar to counter-terrorism investigators.

The evangelical charity World Vision employed similar language after its Gaza director diverted funds to Hamas, and even boasted of its “robust controls and screening processes” after the charity was caught handing $125,000 of taxpayers’ money to a designated terrorist organization in Sudan linked to Bin Laden.

Do ordinary Mormons, driven by compassion and benevolence, really want their religious leaders to respond to legitimate concerns with such similar deflections?

Do they want their tithes spent on organizations that support such radicalism? Do Mormons really want their religious leaders to embrace radicals who openly hate Jews?

And do they want the Church to pursue opaque financial operations, seemingly without adequate oversight, in the most dangerous parts of the globe?

There is little reason to doubt that Mormon institutions’ charitable intentions are good. But notwithstanding its noble fundaments, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has made a series of terrible mistakes.

Rather than fight its critics, it should engage with them, to make sure the Church never again funds terror-aligned extremists.