Help bring the hostages home.
That was the message Thursday at the annual gathering of thousands of conservative activists in a Washington suburb.
Attendees at the CPAC conference heard U.S. Vice President JD Vance tell hostage families that “our message is that President Trump loves you. He hasn’t forgotten your loved ones.”
And they heard from some of the families themselves.
“We always say that we need your prayers and we need your actions,” said Gal Gilboa-Dalal, whose younger brother, Guy Gilboa-Dalal, was kidnapped at the Nova music festival in southern Israel. “Don’t forget the hostages. Don’t forget that they’re waiting for you. Everyone can do something, and we all have the responsibility to do all we can to bring them back—and together we will.”
Gilboa-Dalal said that he urged his brother to attend the festival and agreed to go with him, but they separated. His younger brother was kidnapped, while Gilboa-Dalal spent almost 10 hours fleeing Hamas gunfire. He didn’t learn about his brother’s fate until he called his father from a police station, after being rescued by Israeli forces. His father had seen a Hamas hostage video with his youngest son in it.
“Everyone knew my brother was taken but no one told me, so I could focus on saving my own life,” Gilboa-Dalal told CPAC attendees. “All I could think was I went there to watch over him, and I went back without him.”
Adi Alexander’s son, Edan Alexander, remains the only American-Israeli in captivity. A resident of New Jersey, the younger Alexander took a gap year in Israel and enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces but was captured when Hamas overran his one-person outpost.
“He found a way to surrender,” Alexander said. “We kind of consider ourselves lucky that he managed to surrender.”
The younger Alexander later appeared in a Hamas video, giving his relatives hope that he was still alive.
“This is what drives us forward,” Alexander said at CPAC. “We have to push forward until everybody’s out. Then we will be done.”
Moshe Lavi was living and working in New York when his brother-in-law, Omri Miran, was kidnapped from Kibbutz Nahal Oz. Lavi said he was prepared to rejoin the IDF but said that his sister-in-law, Lishay Miran-Lavi, asked him not to.
“My sister told me, ‘I need you to be my soldier in this war until Omri comes home. I need you to speak up because there are very few people who can speak up for me and Omri like you can,’” Lavi said at the event. “Since then, I’ve been her voice. I’ve been Omri’s voice. I’ve been every single hostage’s voice because they can’t speak from the dungeons of Hamas.”
A recently released hostage reportedly said Miran was alive as of last summer.
Lavi was asked what he wanted CPAC attendees to do about the hostages.
“Close your eyes and imagine with me my nieces, Roni and Alma, running to their father, Omri,” he said. “Imagine my sister, Lishay, hugging and kissing her husband Omri. Imagine Dani, Omri’s father, shaving his beard after hundreds of days and embracing his son Omri.”
“Take that joy of picturing that to mobilize in every way you can—prayer, action, rallying, writing,” he added, “so I can tell my nieces, Roni and Alma, that their father is coming home tomorrow.”