Jerusalem
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Former Israeli hostage Romi Gonen said she endured repeated sexual assault, harassment and intimidation during her 471 days in Hamas captivity, speaking publicly for the first time about her experience and the fear of becoming a “sex slave” in Gaza.
Gonen, now 25, was kidnapped at the age of 23 at the Nova Music Festival on October 7, 2023, and released as part of a hostage deal in January 2025. In a two-part interview aired this week on Israel’s Channel 12 program Uvda, she detailed several incidents of sexual harassment and assault by three different men.
“Only when you’re in a situation like this can you understand what’s going on in your body. And the fear, it’s paralyzing sometimes,” Gonen said of what she called the “worst” assault. According to her account, one of her captors ordered her to the bathroom, followed her inside, and assaulted her. “At one point I cried like crazy in the bathroom,” she said. “And he was ecstatic, like he had received the gift of a lifetime, and he was having the time of his life.”
Looking out the small window, she said, she was struck by the “cacophony between the beautiful, ordinary, clean life outside and the filth, bestiality, and disgust going on inside the bathroom.” In the aftermath of the assault, she recalled thinking: “Romi, all Israelis think you’re dead and that you’re going to be his sex slave for the rest of your life…Then he came to me and put a gun to my head and said, ‘If you tell anyone, I’ll kill you.'”
Gonen, who suffered a gunshot wound to his arm in the Oct. 7 attack, said he spent the first 34 days of his captivity alone, shuttling between his home and his captors. “I had to carry it on my own, and it wasn’t easy. I kept telling myself, ‘You’re strong,’ but no, I’m not strong, no, that won’t fix it, it won’t fix it,” she said through tears.
She described the first assault occurring within days of her abduction, when a person believed to be a medic followed her into the shower on the pretext of treating her wounds. “He allowed himself to ‘help me’ because he was the ‘nurse’. I was hurt, helpless and couldn’t do anything. He took everything from me,” she said. “And I had to continue living in that house with him after that.”
Gonen described “the worst 16 days of captivity” during which he was repeatedly harassed by two prisoners, Ibrahim and Mohamed.
“I’m sitting on the bed and Ibrahim comes and sits next to me and harasses me. Everything is completely silent. I start crying like crazy and he says, ‘Be careful, you’ll get angry if you don’t calm down,'” she said. “The days go by. When I go to the bathroom, Mohamed follows me. I sit on the toilet and pull down my pants with one hand so he can’t see anything. Ibrahim keeps touching me, touching my legs and thighs. I kick them away.”
At one point, Gonen said, senior Hamas commanders realized she was upset by one of the assaults and led her into a tunnel to make a phone call. “I picked up the phone and he said, ‘Hello.’ He spoke Hebrew. He said he wanted me to tell him everything about what happened,” she said, recalling his offer of “some kind of deal.” “I will put you at the top of the release list, and in return you must promise me that you will remain silent.” She identified the man’s voice as that of Izz al-Din al-Haddad, then commander of the Hamas Gaza Brigades and now the group’s Gaza leader, whom she said she had met in person while in detention.
“They would often shut me up and tell me not to talk about it,” Gonen said. “Now I’m here, sitting in front of the camera, and to be honest, no one can shut me up anymore. It happened to me, and it was terrible, and I deal with the consequences every day, but I’m here. I beat it. I’m in the aftermath, and I’m much stronger than that,” she concluded.
Gonen is not the first Israeli hostage to report sexual abuse while in captivity.
A July 2025 report by a group of Israeli researchers known as the Dyna Project found that 13 women and two men who survived captivity by Hamas said they experienced or witnessed sexual violence while being held hostage in Gaza. Based on testimonies, forensic reports, photos and videos from the October 7 attack, researchers concluded that Hamas used sexual violence as a “weapon of war” in a widespread, systematic and “tactical” manner.
In November 2025, Rom Braslavsky, a security guard kidnapped from the Nova festival on October 7, became the first male hostage in Gaza to speak publicly about sexual abuse. Shortly after his release under the cease-fire agreement in October 2025, Braslavsky told Channel 13’s Hajnor that he had been subjected to “horrible” and humiliating sexual violence and abuse. “They stripped me of my clothes, my underwear, everything,” he said, adding: “This was sexual violence and the main purpose was to humiliate me. The purpose was to destroy my dignity.”
A 2024 report by Pramila Patten, the United Nations Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, provided “reasonable grounds to believe” that conflict-related sexual violence, including rape and gang rape, occurred during Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attack, and revealed “clear and convincing” information that hostages in Gaza were sexually abused.
Hamas has repeatedly denied the allegations.
