Peace – May it be lasting peace in Israel
Project DYNAMO was the only American rescue organization to deploy to Israel and the region three separate times since October 7th. Across those missions, we evacuated more than 540 Americans and allies, assisted an additional 1,500 people, and carried out 25 high-risk cross- border extractions. No other U.S. rescue organization returned once. Project DYNAMO returned three times.
Project DYNAMO entered Israel within hours of October 7th, 2023, the day the world witnessed one of the darkest acts of terror in modern history. While the images of the massacre were still emerging, we began moving. Within days, DYNAMO became the first American organization to deploy into Israel to help rescue U.S. citizens and allies caught in the chaos.
What began that day did not end quickly. Over the next two years, as rockets fell and fear became a constant presence, our teams returned twice more. Each mission carried the same purpose and the same risk: to bring Americans and allies home when no one else would. Across that span of time, Project DYNAMO stood as the only American organization to return to Israel three separate times, answering the same call of duty and compassion that began on October 7th.
Much of our work in 2024 and 2025 was coordinated from Tel Aviv, at the Maccabee Hotel, where many survivors and released hostages had been taken. What we witnessed there will never be forgotten: men and women who had lost everything and yet somehow kept breathing. Some sat in silence for hours, staring at nothing. Others clung to photographs of families they would never see again. One man still spoke to the pictures of his murdered wife and children, his voice low and steady, as if love alone could reach across the distance between life and death. Around him, others wept quietly, each trapped in a private world of grief that words could never touch.
What we witnessed there broke our hearts, but it also forged our resolve. We made a promise to ourselves and to every family still waiting we will never leave anyone behind. And we will come back as many times as needed, for as long as it takes, until every American is home.
Now, as hostages are being released, the world is watching the first signs of peace emerge from years of darkness. For some families, this moment means reunion, the miracle of an embrace once thought impossible. For others, it will bring the heartbreak of finality, as all they will receive is a name, a body, or the confirmation of what they already feared. Yet even that painful certainty carries a kind of peace, a closing of the wound that not knowing kept open.
If this new agreement holds and the hostages continue to come home, it will mean far more than a diplomatic success. It will be a moment of restoration, fragile, incomplete, but profoundly human. After everything that has been lost, even one life returned, even one family reunited, even one body laid to rest, is a victory over the darkness that sought to destroy them.
Yet as much as lasting peace is desired, the return of the hostages and the laying to rest of the dead will also reveal what words cannot describe, a silent witnessing of the atrocities committed by these terrorists. The world will see, in the faces and in the stories of the survivors, the true measure of the evil they endured and the strength of those who refused to be broken.
To President Donald Trump, we offer our sincere congratulations. To Jared Kushner, Adam Boehler, and Steve Witkoff, our respect for their persistence and resolve in the face of impossibility.
And to the families, to those reunited, to those who wait, and to those who will never be whole again, may this peace bring you solace. However fragile it may be, may it be lasting peace.
Project Dynamo Rescue
Project DYNAMO has stood in those places where chaos reigns and hope is fading. We go when no one else will. We do it not for profit or politics, but because every life matters, and because being American means never leaving our own behind. Every flight we launch, every rescue we plan, every soul we bring home is made possible by the generosity of those who believe in that mission.
If you believe America should always answer the call when others look away, stand with us.
Help us keep going. Help us keep rescuing. Help us bring them home.