Israeli former hostage Romi Gonen has said in a television interview that four Hamas militants sexually assaulted her during her 15 months in captivity in the Gaza Strip.
"No one will tell me to stay quiet.. I'm here, I won," Gonen, 25, told Israel's Channel 12 in a two-part interview, the second of which was broadcast on Thursday evening.
Gonen, speaking in Hebrew, evoked "different sorts of sexual assaults in captivity, from four different men, with varying degrees of gravity", without ever explicitly using the word "rape" yet still hinting at it.
Gonen, who was released in January 2025 during a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, described how she was once assaulted by one of her guards in the room where she was being held.
"I start crying uncontrollably... He looks at me incessantly and signals to me 'be careful' with his index on his mouth. 'If you don't calm down, I'm going to get angry.'"
On another day Gonen said the guard followed her to the toilet.
"And that's when I was assaulted for the third time. It lasted almost half an hour," she said.
"I said to myself: 'Romi, all of Israel thinks you're dead, when in fact you're going to be his sexual slave for ever'", she said, recounting how she felt one day after an assault.
She recounted how another time her attacker, who was sitting on a couch, looked at her and asked: "'Romi, are you okay or not?'
"In my head, I'm thinking: 'Son of a bitch, how can you ask me that?'
"And then he comes up to me, puts the gun to my temple and says: 'If you mention this to anyone, I'll kill you.'"
Several Israelis and one other woman who were held captive in Gaza and later released have since said that they were sexually assaulted during captivity.
Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which along with allied Palestinian factions held hostages taken during its unprecedented October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, never admitted to any such assaults.
"We affirm that the allegations made by the female captive are false claims," Suhail al-Hindi, a member of Hamas's political bureau, told AFP, referring to Romi Gonen.
She was at the Nova music festival in Reim, near Gaza, when she was abducted.
Of the 251 people seized that day, militants have handed over all the dead and living captives, with the exception of the body of an Israeli police officer.
Last month, rights group Amnesty International accused Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups of crimes against humanity, including torture, enforced disappearance, rape and "other forms of sexual violence".
