Jerusalem
—
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 fear of becoming a “sex slave” in Gaza.
Gonen, now 25, was kidnapped at age 23 from the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, and launched as half 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.
“Only when you’re in this situation can you grasp what happens to the body. And fear – it sometimes paralyzes,” Gonen mentioned, describing what she known as the “worst” assault. According to her account, one captor ordered her into a lavatory, adopted her inside and assaulted her. “There was this one moment in the bathroom, I was crying like crazy,” she mentioned, “and he was having the time of his life, ecstatic, as if he had received the gift of a lifetime.”
Looking by a small window, she mentioned, she was struck by “The dissonance between the beautiful, ordinary clean life outside – and the filth, beastliness, and disgust happening inside the bathroom.” In the aftermath of the assault, she recalled considering: “Romi, everyone in Israel thinks you’re dead, and you’re going to be his sex slave for life… Then he comes up to me, puts a gun to my head, and tells me, ‘If you tell anyone, I am 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, transferring between homes and captors. “I had to be alone with it, and it’s not easy, I kept telling myself, ‘You’re strong.’ But no, I’m not strong, and no, you can’t heal from such a thing, you 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 beneath the pretext of treating her wound. “He was a ‘nurse’ so he allowed himself to ‘help me.’ I was wounded, powerless, and couldn’t do anything. He took everything from me,” she mentioned. “And I had to continue living with him in that house 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 bed. Ibrahim comes and sits next to me and harasses me. Everything is in complete silence. I start crying insanely, and he says, ‘Be careful. If you don’t calm down, I’ll get angry,” she mentioned. “And that’s how the days go by: I go to the bathroom and Mohammed follows me. I sit on the toilet pulling down my pants with one hand, so he won’t see anything. Ibrahim keeps bothering me endlessly, touching my leg and thigh. I kick them off.”
At one level, Gonen mentioned, senior Hamas commanders realized she was shaken by one of the assaults, they led her by tunnels to make a cellphone name. “I picked up the phone, and he said ‘Hello.’ He spoke Hebrew. He asked me to tell him everything that happened,” she mentioned, recalling his proposal for “some form of deal. ‘I will put you at the top of the release list, and in return, you will promise me that you will keep quiet.” She identified the man’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 often silenced my story and told me not to tell it,” Gonen mentioned. “Now I am here, sitting in front of the camera, and honestly, no one will silence me anymore. It happened to me, and it was terrible, and I deal with the consequences every day, but I am here. I beat it. I am in the aftermath, and I am much stronger than it,” she concluded.
Gonen shouldn’t be 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 Project 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, pictures and movies from the October 7 assaults, researchers concluded that Hamas used sexual violence in a widespread, systematic and “tactical” method as a “weapon of war.”
In November 2025, Rom Braslavski, a safety guard kidnapped from the Nova competition on October 7, turned the primary male hostage to talk publicly of sexual abuse in Gaza. A short time after he was launched in the October 2025 ceasefire deal, Braslavski instructed Channel 13’s “Hazinor” that he was subjected to “horrific” and humiliating sexual violence and abuse. “They stripped me of all my clothes, my underwear, everything,” he mentioned, including, “It is sexual violence, and its foremost objective was to humiliate me. The aim was to crush my dignity.
A 2024 report by the UN’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict Pramila Patten discovered “reasonable grounds to believe” that conflict-related sexual violence, together with rape and gang rape occurred throughout Hamas’ October 7 terror assaults, in addition to “clear and convincing” data that hostages in Gaza have been sexually abused.
Hamas has repeatedly denied the allegations.