‘If you tell anyone, I’ll kill you’: Ex-hostage Romi Gonen recounts captors’ repeated sexual assaults |
Former hostage Romi Gonen shared that she was sexually assaulted by four different men on separate occasions during her 471 days as a hostage in Gaza, speaking in an interview that aired on Thursday.
The sit-down on Channel 12’s “Uvda” program detailed her harrowing ordeal, beginning with her abduction from the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, when she was 23 years old.
Gonen, now 25, detailed being taken into the Strip, being moved between several private houses, and then being taken underground several weeks into the war. The hour-long segment is set to be followed up with more of the interview next week.
As soon as she was abducted, Gonen said, she was taken to Shifa Hospital — she’d been shot in the arm amid the Hamas-led terror rampage, before being kidnapped — and already there, she was abused.
As a woman, presumably a nurse, tried to find a vein in her arm, “a guy just started to tear off all my clothes. One of them took off my shoes. Another one took my earrings off my face, another one took the jewelry off my body.”
“I was just there, with some 15 people touching me, at the same time. Until it got to the point they were tearing off all my clothes, but I lay there naked. It was like an out-of-body experience, where you’re seeing everything from above,” she said. “I was sure I was going to wake up without an arm.”
When she came to, she was taken to the first house of her captivity.
Gonen said that, when she speaks about her time in Gaza, she imagines people all wonder: “‘Did they harass you?’ And people don’t ask that question.”
“I also wouldn’t ask, if I were you. But also, I think no one asks because no one wants to hear the answer,” she said.
“I went through all kinds of assaults, from four different men, over the course of my captivity. Different levels of severity.”
The first major assault that she remembers happened on her fourth day in captivity, as she was held in a house with five Hamas operatives.
The abuser was a supposed medical professional who had been tasked with caring for her wounds — though, she said, the pain was so intense that she pleaded with him to take her to the hospital and have the arm amputated.
Gonen said she was allowed to take a shower, and her captor 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........