Former Israeli hostage recounts sexual abuse in Hamas captivity and fear of becoming a ‘sex slave’

By Tal Shalev, Dana Karni, CNN

Jerusalem (CNN) — Former Israeli hostage Romi Gonen said she endured repeated sexual assault, harassment and intimidation during her 471 days of Hamas captivity, speaking publicly for the first time about her experience 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 released as part of the January 2025 hostage deal. In a two-part interview broadcast this week on Israel’s Channel 12 program Uvda, she recounted several incidents of sexual harassment and assault by three different men.

“Only when you’re in this situation can you grasp what happens to the body. And fear – it sometimes paralyzes,” Gonen said, describing what she called the “worst” assault. According to her account, one captor 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 through a small window, she said, 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 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 am going to kill you.’”

Gonen, who suffered a gunshot wound to her arm during the October 7 attack, said she spent the first 34 days of captivity alone, moving between houses 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 said, in tears.

She described the first assault occurring within days of her abduction, when a supposed medic followed her into the shower under 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 said. “And I had to continue living with him in that house afterward.”

Gonen referred to her “worst 16 days of captivity,” during which two captors, identified 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 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 keeps bothering me endlessly, touching my leg and thigh. I kick them off.”

‘Promise me that you’ll keep quiet’

At one point, Gonen said, senior Hamas commanders learned she was shaken by one of the assaults, they led her through tunnels to make a phone call. “I picked up the phone, and he said ‘Hello.’ He spoke Hebrew. He asked me to tell him everything that happened,” she said, recalling his proposal for “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 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 leader, whom she said she also met in person during her captivity.

“They often silenced my story and told me not to tell it,” 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,” she concluded.

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

A July 2025 report by a group of Israeli researchers known as the Dinah 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. Drawing on their testimonies, forensic reports, photographs and videos from the October 7 attacks, researchers concluded that Hamas used sexual violence in a widespread, systematic and “tactical” way as a “weapon of war.”

In November 2025, Rom Braslavski, a security guard kidnapped from the Nova festival on October 7, became the first male hostage to speak publicly of sexual abuse in Gaza. A short while after he was released in the October 2025 ceasefire deal, Braslavski told 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 said, adding, “It is sexual violence, and its main purpose was to humiliate me. The goal was to crush my dignity.

A 2024 report by the UN’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict Pramila Patten found “reasonable grounds to believe” that conflict-related sexual violence, including rape and gang rape occurred during Hamas’ October 7 terror attacks, as well as “clear and convincing” information that hostages in Gaza were sexually abused.

Hamas has repeatedly denied the allegations.

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