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.
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