The families of the hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7 have launched a moving campaign to bring the abducted men, women, and children to America’s Thanksgiving gathering.
The Washington D.C. chapter of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum is asking Americans to download a reserved sign featuring the image of a hostage, which they can then place at an empty spot at their Thanksgiving table as part of the group’s “Seats of Hope” campaign.
“We came up with this idea of how we can make the US raise their voice and support even more, and show the government and officials that we’re behind them, and we want these people back,” organizer Anat Szendro Sevilla told The Post Wednesday.
Sevilla said the campaign encourages American families to keep the hostages at the forefront of their minds and share their stories at their Thanksgiving tables.
“The idea behind our campaign is you host one person, when you [visit the website you] download and get their story,” Sevilla continued, noting that the group worked overtime to bring each hostage’s story to the forefront.
“We’ve been working hours on collecting and researching their stories. Some people you had only one line on the Internet – ‘abducted’ – and we collected information telling a little more about that person and making it personal.”
The team’s mission is that Seats of Hope will remind those in the US who are thousands of miles away from the Israel-Hamas war that the hostages are “people like you and me, that have a story,” Sevilla said.
Participants are encouraged to upload a photo of their reserved sign to the Seats of Hope website, where it will be cataloged as part of a map showing all the featured tables across the nation.
Seats of Hope is the joint effort of Sevilla and three other women at the forum’s D.C. chapter, all of whom are running the campaign on top of their full-time jobs, she explained, noting that 1,200 people visited the campaign website in just two days.
“I cannot put my kids to bed at night without thinking about those kids [who were taken]…I need to help them come home,” she said of her personal motivation.
Sevilla, who is Israeli, said that she is bringing one of the hostage cards to her own Thanksgiving this year, where she is being hosted for the first time by an American family.
“I asked [the hosts] is it okay that I bring my hostage, and I wasn’t sure how they would respond…but they were so accepting,” she told The Post.
The Seats of Hope campaign comes amid reports that Israel and Hamas have reached a deal to release about 50 of the 240 hostages in exchange for a temporary ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.
The hostage crisis has been one of the primary international concerns since Hamas’ sneak attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, which resulted in the deaths of around 1,200 people in addition to the widespread kidnappings.