(Opinon) In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it story right before the New Year, Israel announced it is suspending World Vision, the multi-billion-dollar humanitarian Christian agency, along with 36 others, from operating in Gaza. Israel said it believed these organizations were compromised by Hamas and its partners. In other words, Israel banned World Vision due to its connections to terrorists.

This probably comes as a shock to World Vision’s evangelical supporters, but tensions have been rising for some time. Unfortunately, rather than be transparent, World Vision has gone to great lengths to keep this issue out of the public eye as much as it could.

Last year, in another little-noticed story, Hamas traded three October 7th hostages for (among others) Mohammad el-Halabi. Halabi was formerly World Vision’s Gaza Director, having been employed by World Vision for 11 years. He had been serving time in an Israeli jail since 2016 and was convicted in 2022 for siphoning off about $43 million in World Vision’s funds to support Hamas.

A year before the arrest, fellow Gazan and World Vision employee Mohammad Mehdi had accused Halabi, but was not taken seriously. Thirty-five others later backed up Mehdi’s story. Mehdi left the organization over the matter. 

I’ve been working on this issue, and related concerns, for nearly a decade, and I’ve waited for years for World Vision to come clean and admit what happened. It’s now clear they have no intention of doing so. Thus, I am bringing to the public’s attention an aggressive, deceptive and very successful PR campaign to obscure and distort these facts, and that of several other terror finance scandals.

World Vision claims that Halabi’s multiple confessions of funding Hamas, which were important to his conviction, were coerced. It cites vague allegations of beatings and/or other forms of duress, the details of which have never been made public. And true, Halabi was appealing his conviction prior to him being traded for Israeli hostages. But World Vision’s claims and excuses were never plausible, and I explained this in a detailed article predating October 7th.

Furthermore, the fact that Hamas so recently traded Israeli hostages for Halabi is as damning of a fact as anyone could imagine. Hamas does not trade hostages for innocent people.

On rare occasions when journalists have noticed World Vision’s smoke-and-mirrors act, their PR campaign has gone into high gear.

Take, for example, Nancy French, the journalist responsible for blowing the lid off the Kanakuk Kamps sexual abuse coverup. In 2023, French, a former World Vision donor, also began tweeting about World Vision’s problems with terror finance.

But rather than take this as an opportunity to fully explain themselves, high-level World Vision communications staff and lawyers reached out to French in an effort to have “off the record” background chats.

French, noting that an off-the-record conversation would make future criticism virtually impossible — and that she was asking about publicly available facts — refused. She repeatedly asked for either written responses to her questions, or an on-the-record interview. World Vision refused.

“I am very familiar with the way institutions try to handle journalists,” said French, “especially Christian journalists. It’s small talk, Zooms, how are you, so glad to meet you, why are we persecuted, do you know-so-and-so, can’t we all be reasonable — without actually answering the questions.” 

World Vision is still coasting on prior PR successes. An Australian news story announcing Halabi’s release cites several debunked talking points. Among them are that a forensic audit —— that World Vision ordered on itself — was exonerating. It said a similar audit by the Australian government, previously a major funder of World Vision’s Gaza operation, exonerated them as well.

The matter of World Vision’s self-audit remains a controversy. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) began investigating the Halabi matter. He’d previously investigated World Vision’s use of taxpayer funds for a program aimed at providing food security in Blue Nile, Sudan, while partnering with a U.S. terror-designated Sudanese charity to do so.

He found that World Vision was “borderline negligent” for having ignored “elementary level investigative procedures,” resulting in taxpayer funds flowing to a terrorist entity that funded Osama bin Laden.

Grassley’s committee repeatedly asked World Vision to provide the supposedly vindicating audit of the Halabi matter. World Vision claimed it could not give the report to Grassley, because it had previously contracted only to give it to certain governmental (including the US State Department and USAID) agencies. Those agencies did not include the Senate. 

Not only did this ignore the Senate’s constitutional duties to perform oversight, but it raised the question of why World Vision would limit who could see a supposedly vindicating audit on itself. It also declined to give this audit to an Israeli court, because Israeli authorities declined to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Grassley’s investigation appears to be ongoing.

Grassley is not the only actor interested in this episode. A U.S. diplomatic official briefed on the IG’s criminal investigations noted that “Terrorists like el-Halabi latch onto aid agencies to divert lifesaving aid intended from civilians to FTOs (foreign terrorist organizations).” The official also pointed to “Operation Stop the Carousel,” which was launched in November, designed to uncover evidence regarding the scope and nature of terrorist interference of humanitarian aid programs in Gaza.

As a matter of policy, the USAID IG declines to comment on any active and ongoing investigation, into World Vision or any other private organization. But the diplomat briefed on the IG’s efforts pointed to the Grassley investigation and noted: “No taxpayer wants to contribute to funding salaries of terrorists in Gaza and as you can see from the Grassley investigation of World Vision, it’s been a longstanding concern that now is being addressed … We expect the UN and NGO sector’s full cooperation with the IG’s probe.”

The official added that the USAID inspector general is “laser-focused on this issue” and is “ramping up efforts to detect and hold accountable terrorists masquerading as aid workers who circulate across NGOs such as World Vision.”

Any suggestion that the Australian audit vindicated World Vision is categorically false. When one Australian broadcaster ran a story claiming this, then-Australian Ambassador to Israel Dave Sharma, and the then-Chairman of the Australian Parliamentary Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Michael Danby both put out statements correcting the record.

Danby noted, “One doesn’t need to be a journalist or lawyer to understand that such an internal review by DFAT could not exonerate World Vision or its employee in relation to allegations of diversion of funds to Hamas.

Meanwhile, Sharma noted that the audit left Halabi’s guilt or innocence to the same Israeli courts that later found him guilty. But World Vision cited falsehoods such as this error-filled media story to mislead people.

This pattern has continued. Even after Hamas traded for Halabi, former World Vision Australia CEO Tim Costello openly celebrated Halabi’s release, without bothering to note that his freedom was arranged by a Hamas-negotiated swap for Israeli hostages.

World Vision’s PR campaign succeeds because of three prejudices they exploit. 

• Too many people don’t want to believe the worst of a Christian organization. This has been the case in sex scandals that have engulfed organizations like the Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention and Kanakuk Kamps. But putting your head in the sand makes the problem worse.
• Sympathy for World Vision’s cause, and disgust at the way the Trump administration has decimated foreign aid, has muted criticism. I’ve publiclyechoed these concerns. Foreign aid is important, and the Trump administration’s handling of this issue has been unlawful and destructive. But they didn’t happen in a vacuum. Repeated missteps by World Vision and others helped build cynicism concerning the whole industry.
• The issue “codes” as sympathy for Israel, particularly in light of the controversial Gaza war.

 
You don’t have to be a theological Christian Zionist, or to be uncritical of Israel (I’m neither) to find these facts troubling. In fact, leaked Jordanian intelligence documents implicate the Netanyahu administration in World Vision’s funding of Hamas. People can judge these publicly available documents for themselves, but it should put to bed the idea that this is a matter of defending Israel uncritically.

Hamas is an oppressor and murderer of the Palestinian people. Indeed, Hamas fears, more than anything, Palestinians that are critical of Israel but tell the truth about Hamas.

It is difficult to imagine World Vision standing by Halabi, in spite of overwhelming evidence, if not for the fact that it’s has been highly critical of Israel for decades.

World Vision’s donors should not be so oblivious. That Hamas traded Israeli hostages for Halabi is the final nail in the coffin, showing beyond any reasonable doubt that he, and thus World Vision, helped fund Hamas for years.

Israel’s banning of World Vision from operating in Gaza should be seen, not as hostility to those wishing to improve Palestinian lives, but as common-sense. That World Vision continues to mislead its donors, politicians, and the wider public about this is more damning than diverted funds themselves. It should not be allowed to get away with it.

Prior to publication of this article, The Roys Report sent World Vision a set of detailed questions concerning the claims in this analysis. On Thursday, a World Vision spokesperson responded: “In response to the analysis and recap of Mohammad’s case, we’d direct you to our previous press statements on this case, which outline our position. We have nothing further to add.”

Click here to read World Vision’s statements on the Halabi case.

This commentary does not necessarily reflect the views of The Roys Report.

Cliff Smith is a lawyer and a former congressional staffer. He lives in Washington, D.C., where he works on national security related issues.