Washington, D.C. — House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik and House Republican leadership held a press conference with families of hostages kidnapped by Hamas during the barbaric terrorist attacks on October 7th. House Republicans stand with the Jewish community, our great ally Israel, and will do everything in their power to ensure Israel has the resources to defend itself and return every last hostage to their family.
View the full transcript of her remarks below:
“Today, the House Republican Conference is joined by the families of four of the over 200 hostages taken by barbaric, Hamas terrorists on October 7th. As a mother, sister, and daughter, my heart breaks for the unspeakable pain they are enduring every second of every day. On this issue of standing with Israel and these families, there can be no moral equivocation. As Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu stated last week this war is ‘between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism. It is a time for everyone to decide where they stand.’
Horrifically, the Jewish people have suffered their bloodiest days since the Holocaust with acts of inhumane evil committed by Hamas terrorists backed by Iran. In fact, this week marks 85 years since Kristallnacht (kri-stuhl-naakt). The pogroms unleashed during the Night of Broken Glass and the aftermath they wrought shocked the conscience of the globe and led then U.S. President FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to proclaim, ‘I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth-century civilization.’
The unspeakable atrocities of today have been met by some with callous cruelty in our own twenty-first century United States. Posters of innocent victims have been ripped down. American universities failing to protect their Jewish students from intimidation, harassment, and violence, and just yesterday, an elderly, Jewish man in Los Angeles was beaten to death by a pro-Palestine protestor.
Hear this loudly and clearly, House Republicans stand with these families next to us. We stand with the Jewish community, and we stand like a rock, as our Speaker said, with our most precious ally Israel. We will do everything in our power to ensure that Israel has the resources to return every last hostage to their family from these Hamas terrorists. With that, I am honored to introduce our Speaker of the House - a great friend of Israel - Speaker Mike Johnson.”
