Former Israeli hostage recounts sexual abuse in Hamas captivity and worry of changing into a ‘intercourse slave’

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Former Israeli hostage Romi Gonen mentioned she endured repeated sexual assault , harassment and intimidation throughout her 471 days of Hamas captivity, talking publicly for the primary time about her expertise and her worry of changing into a “intercourse slave” in Gaza.

Gonen, now 25, was kidnapped at age 23 from the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, and launched as a part of the January 2025 hostage deal . In a two-part interview broadcast this week on Israel’s Channel 12 program Uvda, she recounted a number of incidents of sexual harassment and assault by three totally different males.

“Solely if you’re on this scenario are you able to grasp what occurs to the physique. And worry – it typically paralyzes,” Gonen mentioned, describing what she known as the “worst” assault. Based on her account, one captor ordered her into a rest room, adopted her inside and assaulted her. “There was this one second within the toilet, I used to be crying like loopy,” she mentioned, “and he was having the time of his life, ecstatic, as if he had acquired the present of a lifetime.”

Wanting via a small window, she mentioned, she was struck by “The dissonance between the gorgeous, extraordinary clear life outdoors – and the filth, beastliness, and disgust occurring inside the toilet.” Within the aftermath of the assault, she recalled considering: “Romi, everybody in Israel thinks you’re lifeless, and also you’re going to be his intercourse slave for all times… Then he comes as much as me, places a gun to my head, and tells me, ‘Should you inform anybody, I'm going to kill you.’”

Gonen, who suffered a gunshot wound to her arm in the course of the October 7 assault, mentioned she spent the primary 34 days of captivity alone, shifting between homes and captors. “I needed to be alone with it, and it’s not simple, I saved telling myself, ‘You’re sturdy.’ However no, I’m not sturdy, and no, you possibly can’t heal from such a factor, you possibly can’t,” she mentioned, in tears.

She described the primary assault occurring inside days of her abduction, when a supposed medic adopted her into the bathe underneath the pretext of treating her wound. “He was a ‘nurse’ so he allowed himself to ‘assist me.’ I used to be wounded, powerless, and couldn’t do something. He took all the things from me,” she mentioned. “And I needed to proceed residing with him in that home afterward.”

Gonen referred to her “worst 16 days of captivity,” throughout which two captors, recognized as Ibrahim and Muhammed, repeatedly harassed her.

“I’m sitting on the mattress. Ibrahim comes and sits subsequent to me and harasses me. The whole lot is in full silence. I begin crying insanely, and he says, ‘Watch out. Should you don’t relax, I’ll get indignant,” she mentioned. “And that’s how the times go by: I am going to the toilet and Mohammed follows me. I sit on the bathroom flattening my pants with one hand, so he received’t see something. Ibrahim retains bothering me endlessly, touching my leg and thigh. I kick them off.”

At one level, Gonen mentioned, senior Hamas commanders discovered she was shaken by one of many assaults, they led her via tunnels to make a telephone name. “I picked up the telephone, and he mentioned ‘Whats up.’ He spoke Hebrew. He requested me to inform him all the things that occurred,” she mentioned, recalling his proposal for “some form of deal. ‘I'll put you on the prime of the discharge listing, and in return, you'll promise me that you'll preserve quiet.” She recognized the person’s voice as belonging to Izz a Din al-Haddad, then head of the Hamas Gaza Brigade, and now the group’s Gaza chief, whom she mentioned she additionally met in individual throughout her captivity.

“They usually silenced my story and informed me to not inform it,” Gonen mentioned. “Now I'm right here, sitting in entrance of the digital camera, and truthfully, nobody will silence me anymore. It occurred to me, and it was horrible, and I take care of the results every single day, however I'm right here. I beat it. I'm within the aftermath, and I'm a lot stronger than it,” she concluded.

Gonen is just not the primary Israeli hostage to report sexual abuse in captivity.

A July 2025 report by a group of Israeli researchers generally known as the Dinah Venture discovered that 13 girls and two males who survived captivity by Hamas mentioned they skilled or witnessed sexual violence whereas being held hostage in Gaza. Drawing on their testimonies, forensic experiences, images and movies from the October 7 assaults, researchers concluded that Hamas used sexual violence in a widespread, systematic and “tactical” means as a “weapon of conflict.”

In November 2025, Rom Braslavski, a safety guard kidnapped from the Nova pageant on October 7, turned the primary male hostage to talk publicly of sexual abuse in Gaza. A short time after he was launched within the October 2025 ceasefire deal, Braslavski informed Channel 13’s “Hazinor” that he was subjected to “horrific” and humiliating sexual violence and abuse. “They stripped me of all my garments, my underwear, all the things,” he mentioned, including, “It's sexual violence, and its most important function was to humiliate me. The aim was to crush my dignity.

A 2024 report by the UN’s Particular Consultant on Sexual Violence in Battle Pramila Patten discovered “cheap grounds to consider” that conflict-related sexual violence, together with rape and gang rape occurred throughout Hamas’ October 7 terror assaults, in addition to “clear and convincing” info that hostages in Gaza have been sexually abused.