BLOOMSBURG, Pennsylvania — Dave McCormick is standing in front of his parents’ home on the outskirts of this Columbia County college town; it’s been just one day since returning from his “gutting” trip to Israel where he and wife Dina Powell McCormick spent 36 hours visiting an Israeli community at the border with Gaza where scores of Jews were killed last Oct. 7.
He admits he is still shaken from what he and his wife, who served as a deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration, saw, some of which he says is too gruesome for print but should be mandatory for every lawmaker in Washington to experience.
“There was one house we went into where there was a safe room where a young lady, who was 18 or 19 years old, was with her boyfriend,” McCormick said. “On that day, she had been texting with her father, and she’s saying they’re safe and the father’s safe. And then all of a sudden, the terrorists find her and him and then the texts just end. It was in that moment she was gone, and you see the text messages printed out on the wall of the home to remind people what happened.”
The father of six daughters all around that age said that moment really hit home for him. “You imagine your own daughter texting with you in a dangerous place and you put yourself in their place,” he said, his voice trailing off.
McCormick said they both met with some of the survivors of the attack.
“We met with a young woman who had got shot in the knee. She’s still recovering. She was at the music festival and they were in a bomb shelter, and they came in and just threw grenades and started shooting people,” he said.
McCormick said because she was shot in the knee, she was immobilized, “a circumstance that eventually led her to be stuck underneath the dead bodies of other people. It was the only reason she survived. They thought she was dead. And she literally couldn’t get out until hours later when a rescue group came in and pulled the dead bodies off of her.”
They also met with soldiers who had been shot in action that day and four families of hostages who are still dealing with the terrible unknown of what horror and torture their family members have been enduring for over three months.
“We talked to them about what as a parent it must be like to not know. … It’s day 101 or something like that, what has happened to their children,” he said.
It is estimated that over 240 people were taken hostage to Gaza by either Hamas or other fringe Palestinian terrorist groups on Oct. 7. In December, a temporary truce was called, leading to dozens of hostages being released, but the truce collapsed in under a week.
Israeli officials estimate there are still more than 130 hostages in Gaza.
McCormick said at one point, they were just 600 feet from the border with Gaza, visiting place after place, seeing the raw evidence of what the people who lived in the community encountered that day. “You see the bullet holes through everything. … It’s just … you realize how these innocent people were slaughtered,” he said, clearly caught up in the raw emotion of what he had just seen the day before.
The Washington County native, who spent his entire childhood here until he left for West Point, announced this fall he is challenging Scranton Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) for the Senate seat that Casey has held since 2007, said he also visited with Israel Defense Forces during his ground trip to Israel last week.
McCormick said watching the IDF compilation of the Hamas attack footage was arguably the hardest part of the visit. “I can’t get it out of my mind,” he said of the 47-minute video that comes from the body cameras of the terrorists.
“It’s the cameras in the kibbutz. There’s no editing. It’s literally just demonic. And then the scariest thing is you see them taking the hostages back into Gaza, and it’s not just the Hamas people, it’s the people cheering. And they’re dragging these poor women. The women are bloodied and it’s just … it’s just awful,” he said.
McCormick said the way the IDF described it to him was that it happened in three waves.
“There was the first, which were the highly trained thousand troops that had been to Iran, and then there was the second wave, which were paramilitary, but less trained, and the third wave were just looters who went in and then got caught up in the barbarism,” he said.
McCormick said the visit and experiences have reinforced for him you can have both moral clarity on any issue and not be bombastic in how you address it.
“I’ve become more and more convinced of the need to speak clearly and to speak unequivocally … even if it offends people,” he said.
“We see these mealy-mouthed college presidents who have been incredibly weak and even Casey, whose condemnation of the terror has also walked the line of trying not to offend his progressive wing and it’s just weak,” he said.
In contrast, McCormick said Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), another Pennsylvania Democrat, has been full-throated in his support of Israel.
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“Who would have thought?” he said. “And I try to be forthright about that. I mean, I’m sure Sen. Fetterman and I disagree on more things than we agree on, but on this give the guy credit. He’s been an absolute force for moral clarity. He’s been unequivocal, and that’s what we need right now.”
McCormick said it just reinforced for him the importance of using your voice in leadership and taking a stand on politically charged issues, “Speak clearly, speak decisively, speak regularly, speak loudly. Because when leaders don’t speak, it makes it hard for people to choose.”