‘He Took Everything From Me’: Israeli Hostage Details Sexual Abuse by Hamas ‘Nurse,’ Cameraman in Gaza

A former Israeli hostage has shared for the first time her harrowing account of sexual abuse during captivity. Romi Gonen, now 25, was abducted from the Nova music festival during Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and held in Gaza for 471 days. She was released in January as part of a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas.In an interview with Israel’s Channel 12 News that aired Thursday, Ms. Gonen detailed the horrific story of her abduction and subsequent abuse by several captors.“I went through all kinds of assaults, from four different men, over the course of my captivity. Different levels of severity,” she said.The first assault occurred on her fourth day in captivity. She was held in a house with five Hamas operatives, one claiming to be a medical professional responsible for treating her wounds. During the October 7 attack she sustained a serious gunshot injury to her arm. At one point Ms. Gonen’s captors permitted her to take a shower, but the man followed her “because he’s a nurse and he came to ‘help’ me in the shower.” “I was wounded, I had no power over them, and I was in a situation in which I couldn’t do anything. He took everything from me,” she said. “And I had to continue living with him in the house afterward.”Two weeks later she was transferred to the home of a Hamas cameraman, Mohammed, at the Shati camp in northern Gaza where she endured some of the worst abuse of her captivity. During the sixteen days there, Mohammed and another man, Ibrahim, assaulted her.“I’m sitting on the bed. Ibrahim comes and sits next to me, and harasses me,” she recalled. “Everything happens in the room, in complete silence. I start crying insanely. Everything is quiet, and he says, ‘Be careful. If you don’t calm down, I’ll get angry,’” She continued: “And that’s how the days pass: I go to the bathroom and Mohammed is with me, and he watches me. I pee, and with one hand, I pull down my pants. I sit on the toilet so that God forbid he won’t see anything of me. Ibrahim keeps bothering me endlessly. They grab my leg and move up to my thigh. I kick.”Ms. Gonen said Mohammed “slept with me” every night “with a gun under the pillow and an AK next to the bed.” He would repeatedly interrogate her about her sexual history: “Who have you slept with? When did you sleep with them?”She later described missing her period, which “terrified everyone.” Ms. Gonen feared someone had raped her while she drifted in and out of consciousness while at Al Shifa hospital due to her gunshot wound “and I didn’t know.” Her captors eventually brought a pregnancy test. It came back negative.Two days later, she was woken by Mohammed and Ibrahim talking above her. Mohammed told her that Hamas had ordered him to kill her but that he could keep her alive “for myself” if they fled the house.“He said: ‘Go to the bathroom, wash yourself in the sink, because I don’t know when you’ll be able to shower again.’ And that was the first time I went to the bathroom alone. And I went to the bathroom. Then, he came after me.” He then assaulted her for some 30 minutes. She wept while her abuser was “ecstatic,” having gotten “a gift for life.”She recalled being in complete shock: “All that went through my head was: ‘Romi, everyone in Israel thinks you’re dead, and you’re going to be his sex slave.'” Her abuser later pressed a gun to her head and threatened to kill her if she disclosed the abuse.The hour-long interview is just the first of several segments to be released next week. Ms. Gonen’s testimony was praised by Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, who called her words “heartbreaking.”“In a trembling voice, yet with extraordinary courage, Romi revealed the hell she endured in Hamas captivity — sexual violence and a systematic attempts to crush the human spirit,” Mr. Herzog wrote on X. “Her story must be told everywhere, so that all will remember what we endured as a people, what the hostages endured, and what Romi endured.”Ms. Gonen is one of several former hostages who have described sexual abuse by their captors. Several male hostages released under the American-brokered ceasefire deal recounted being stripped and sexually abused by male guards.Previously unreported accounts of rape and sexual abuse during Hamas’s October 7, 2023 massacre were detailed in a July report entitled “A Quest for Justice: October 7 and Beyond.” The report drew on survivor testimonies, eyewitness accounts, forensic evidence, and interviews with first responders to conclude that Hamas deliberately used sexual violence during the attack to dehumanize, degrade, and terrorize Israelis.

‘He Took Everything From Me’: Israeli Hostage Details Sexual Abuse by Hamas ‘Nurse,’ Cameraman in Gaza

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