Majority Leader Schumer Statement Observing One Year Since Hamas’s October 7th Attack Against Israel

New York, N.Y. – Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), following a morning at his synagogue in Brooklyn, released the following statement marking one year since Hamas’s brutal terrorist attack against Israel:

Today, we observe one year since October 7th, a day that will go down in infamy, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.   

The viciousness and brutality of Hamas’s attack remains overwhelming and heart wrenching: murdering nearly 1,200 Israelis, raping and abusing innocent victims, taking hundreds hostage, killing young people at a music festival, and burning homes to the ground to smoke out women and children.

When I went to Israel days after October 7th to express American solidarity with the Israeli people and Israel’s right to self-defense, we gathered with the families of American victims of Hamas’s attack. I will never forget the meeting. I still remember when one of the family members told me every minute is an hour, every day is a year not knowing the fate of their loved ones held in Hamas’s captivity.

We must not and we cannot waver in our efforts to bring the hostages home. It is long past time. 

365 days later, nearly half of the hostages taken into Gaza on that fateful day remain in Hamas’s brutal captivity. This includes the 7 American hostages and several of my own constituents in New York: Sagui Dekel-Chen, Edan Alexander, Omer Neutra, and Keith Siegel, and Itay Chen, Judi Weinstein Haggai, and Gad Haggai whose bodies Hamas still holds. We also honor the memory and strength of Hersh Goldberg-Polin. Today, we continue to pray for the hostage families, those who have lost loved ones, and the victims of Hamas’s brutality. We will never forget them. 

Hamas displayed such viciousness on that horrible day to try to scare the Israeli people, the American people and freedom-loving people of the world into submission—but they failed. 

We will never forget.

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