Relatives of American victims of the Oct. 7 attacks asked Congress to investigate the 2023 Hamas-led terrorist attacks during a memorial ceremony at the U.S. State Department on Wednesday.
The memorial, attended by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and CENTCOM commander Adm. Bradley Cooper, was closed to the press, but some of the family members who attended spoke to reporters that evening.
Ruby Chen, whose 19-year-old son was serving in the Israel Defense Forces and was killed on Oct. 7, said that Congress has a responsibility to examine the deaths of the 46 U.S. citizens killed in the attack.
“The United States can do much more to suck out the oxygen from these terrorist organizations and they can—they should—bring these people to justice on United States soil,” Chen told reporters. “The way they go about it is Congress.”
Ido Dan, a relative of two people who were killed on Oct. 7, said that understanding how the attack happened and caught Israel by surprise was fundamental to Israel’s purpose as a Jewish state.
“After 2,000 years, we came back to our own country with the promise of ‘never again,’” Dan said. “Without doing this probe, I don’t think we can ever promise to any of our children and our grandchildren that it will never happen again.”
Like many of the family members of American victims of Oct. 7, Chen and Dan live in Israel, where the question of launching a potential state commission of inquiry into Oct. 7 has divided the country politically in the days before its election.
Chen said that if Israel does not launch such an investigation more than three years after the attacks, the United States should.
“For the love of God, if Israel is not capable of creating an investigation committee, then I think it is suitable and appropriate that the good people of the United States, the people in Congress, do provide us the answers that we’re looking for,” he said.
In December, the Knesset narrowly passed a bill to create a “special” commission of inquiry that would deviate from some past investigations by having politically appointed commissioners rather than giving that responsibility to the president of Israel’s Supreme Court.
Israeli opposition parties have opposed that form of inquiry and are holding a rally with the families of Oct. 7 victims in Tel Aviv on Oct. 24 to demand a regular commission. Israel will hold its election on Oct. 27.
The more than a dozen family members who traveled to Washington for the State Department ceremony were united in seeking answers and wanting the United States to honor the memory of American citizens killed in the attacks. They disagreed about what form that inquiry might take.
“I heard that the ministers of Netanyahu, they like to visit the United States. Well, let’s give them another reason to come in and sit in front of an impartial investigation committee of the United States,” Chen said. “Nobody should be afraid of the honest facts, including the prime minister of Israel.”
David Brief, whose son was shot 13 times in IDF service on Oct. 7 and died of his wounds a year later, said that he wasn’t sure that a “formal investigation” in the United States of that kind was necessary.
“That’s a different issue than why we’re here,” Brief said, in response to Chen. “We’re here to memorialize what happened and how we go ahead from this.”
Brief said that a U.S. investigation could prompt Israel to launch its own inquiry.
“To call on the American government to investigate it is just a way of pressuring the Israeli government, but the responsibility clearly lies with Israel and the Israeli government,” he said.
Some of the relatives of Oct. 7 victims who attended said that they are still seeking answers to basic questions about what happened to their relatives that day.
Tom Shalom, whose brother Ram was killed at the Nova music festival, said that his family never received an account of what happened to Ram’s corpse.
“At the funeral, they didn’t let us see the body, so we don’t know what we put in the ground,” he said. “Six months after, they opened the grave and put in other pieces.”
