Freed Israeli hostage Romi Gonen says Hamas captors tried to silence her after sexual assaults in Gaza

Former Israeli hostage Romi Gonen has spoken publicly for the first time about the sexual assaults and psychological terror she endured during her 471 days in Hamas captivity, saying “no one will silence me anymore”.

Ms Gonen, 25, was abducted at age 23 from the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, and freed in the January 2025 hostage deal.

In a two-part interview aired on Israel’s Channel 12 program Uvda, she described multiple sexual assaults and harassment by four different captors.

“I endured various types of harassment by four different men during my captivity. The first situation happened on my fourth day in captivity,” she said.

“Only when you’re in this situation can you grasp what happens to the body. And fear – it sometimes paralyses,” Ms Gonen said, recounting what she called the “worst” attack.

One of her captors, she said, ordered her into a bathroom, followed her inside, and assaulted her. “There was this one moment in the bathroom, I was crying like crazy,” she said, “and he was having the time of his life, ecstatic, as if he had received the gift of a lifetime.”

Looking out a window, she said she was haunted by “the dissonance between the beautiful, ordinary clean life outside and the filth, beastliness, and disgust happening inside the bathroom.”

Afterward, she recalled thinking: “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’ll kill you.’”

Ms Gonen, who was shot in the arm during the October 7 assault, said she spent her first 34 days of captivity alone, shuttled between different houses and guards. “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 said, crying.

The first assault, she said, happened within days of her abduction. A doctor followed her into the shower to treat 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,” Gonen recalled. “And I had to continue living with him in that house afterward.”

Ms Gonen also described her “worst 16 days,” when two captors identified as Ibrahim and Mohammed repeatedly harassed her.

“I’m sitting on the bed, suddenly Ibrahim comes and sits next to me and harasses me. Everything is in complete silence. I start crying hysterically, but in silence, ‘Be careful. If you don’t cool down, I’ll get mad,’” she said. “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 harassed me non-stop, he kept grabbing my leg... I’d kick and pull it back but he’d grab it again.”

At one point, she said, senior Hamas commanders learned she was shaken after one of the assaults and led her through tunnels to make a call. “I picked up the phone, and he said ‘Hello.’ He spoke Hebrew. He asked me to tell him everything that happened,” she said.

The man then proposed “some kind 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 his voice as that of Izz a Din al-Haddad, then the Hamas Gaza Brigade commander, now the group’s Gaza chief.

“They often silenced my story and told me not to tell it,” Ms Gonen said. “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”.

Ms Gonen is not the only former hostage to report sexual abuse in Gaza. A July 2025 report from Israeli researchers known as the Dinah Project found that 13 women and two men who survived Hamas captivity said they experienced or witnessed sexual violence.

Based on their testimonies, evidence, and footage from the October 7 attacks, researchers concluded that Hamas systematically used sexual violence as a “weapon of war”.

In November 2025, Rom Braslavski, a security guard taken from the Nova festival, became the first male hostage to publicly describe sexual abuse in captivity.

After his release in the October 2025 ceasefire deal, Braslavski told Channel 13’s Hazinor that he was subjected to “horrific” and degrading assaults.

“They stripped me of all my clothes, my underwear, everything,” he said. “It is sexual violence, and its main purpose was to humiliate me. The goal was to crush my dignity.”

A 2024 report by UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict Pramila Patten found “reasonable grounds to believe” that rape and other forms of sexual violence occurred during Hamas’ October 7 terror attacks, and “clear and convincing” evidence that hostages in Gaza were also sexually abused.