Hamas hostage abused as sex slave
“Everything happened in complete silence”
12/26/2025 – 11:09 p.mReading time: 2 minutes
She was held captive by Hamas for 471 days. Romi Gonen speaks for the first time about the sexual violence she was exposed to on a daily basis.
In a harrowing interview with the Israeli broadcaster UVDA, the Israeli Romi Gonen reported on her imprisonment by Hamas. She was held captive by her tormentors for weeks and sexually abused by several men.
On the first day after her abduction on October 7th, she was visited by an alleged doctor. “I was injured, I had no strength and I couldn’t do anything,” recalls the former hostage. “He took everything from me.” The fear, she says, kept her frozen. She couldn’t think about much except “how disgusting” it was. “Why?” she asked herself again and again.
During her captivity she was moved several times and repeatedly raped. One of the Hamas terrorists also took video recordings of her, and another was assigned to accompany her. “I told him to stop,” says the 24-year-old. But he didn’t have that. The tormentors would never have left her alone; she was monitored every step of the way. There was rarely any conversation. “Everything happened in complete silence. And I knew that if I didn’t stay calm, it would get worse.”
A particularly long-lasting attack still weighs on her. She looked out of a small window, saw the blue sky, heard the birds. And in the room she was in there was only brutality and powerlessness. “This dissonance,” says the Israeli, “between the normal, clean world outside and what is currently being done to me – that is an image that will never leave me.” She once cried violently during a rape in a bathroom. “And he had the time of his life,” she says.
The uncertainty as to whether she would ever be released and whether her relatives would know that she was still alive was just as bad as the question of what future she had. “Everyone in Israel thinks I’m dead – and I’m being held here as a sex slave.” She was told with a gun to her head that she was not allowed to say anything about the attacks.
Romi Gonen was released in January 2025 after 471 days in Hamas captivity. For the first time, she spoke in detail in an interview about the torture, sexual violence and dehumanization she experienced.
