Australian man arrested over online remarks in support of Bondi Hanukkah attack |
The Times of Israel is liveblogging Thursday’s events as they unfold.
Former hostage Romi Gonen tells Channel 12’s “Uvda” program about her harrowing ordeal in Gaza. Gonen says she was sexually assaulted by four different men during her time as a hostage.
She says the first assault happened on her fourth day in captivity, the abuser being a doctor who was tasked with caring for her injuries sustained during the Hamas-led October 7 attack and her abduction.
Gonen says she was allowed to take a shower, and the man followed her in “because he’s a nurse and he came to ‘help’ me in the shower.”
“I was injured, I had no power, and I was in a situation in which I couldn’t do anything,” she says.
“He took everything from me,” she says. “Afterward, I had to continue living with him in the house.”
Gonen says her next attacker was a cameraman who filmed clips of her for propaganda purposes. When she was moved homes, she was forced to stay alone with man, Muhammad, who then began touching her. Gonen says she told him to stop and went to another room, but that the next day Muhammad told her he would be beside her from then on out. “And that’s how my ordeal in that house began,” she says.
She says that for many days, Muhammad and a second man, Ibrahim, assaulted her.
“I’m sitting on the bed. Ibrahim comes and sits next to me, and harasses me. 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.’ And that’s how the days pass: I go to the bathroom and Muhammad 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. It went on for 16 days… Those were by far the worst 16 days of my captivity.”
But Gonen says the worst single attack came later, when another captor in another house followed her into the toilet and assaulted her for some 30 minutes.
“I remember this one moment when I looked — there was a kind of window there, a small square like a picture frame — and I looked through the window and said to myself: ‘Wow. Blue skies, birds chirping, and this is the situation I’m in right now.’ The dissonance between life outside, the beautiful, normal, clean life, and the filth and brutality and utter disgust that’s happening here inside the bathroom — It’s a moment I will never forget in my life,” she says.
The whole world needs to hear the courageous testimony of Romi Gonen, who survived Hamas captivity, about the horrific sexual violence she endured there!@Uvda_tweet pic.twitter.com/9m1fhySeOG
— יוסף חדאד – Yoseph Haddad (@YosephHaddad) December 25, 2025
Gonen says she was weeping throughout the assault, while her abuser “was at the peak of his life. He got a gift for life.”
Afterward, she says the world was spinning. “All that went through my head was: ‘Romi, everyone in Israel thinks you’re dead, and you’re going to be a sex slave in captivity.’”
Later, her abuser “presses a gun to my head and tells me, ‘If you tell anyone about this, I’ll kill you.’”
A man in his thirties is seriously injured following a collision between two cars on Route 5 in the northern West Bank. A second man, aged around 45, is in medium condition.
Magen David Adom paramedics rush the two men to the hospital.
The IDF says it is investigating a fatal shooting that occurred overnight during a suspected smuggling incident in the Nitzana area along the Egyptian border, as Haaretz reports that the man killed was a Bedouin civilian from the village of Bir Hadaj.
According to an initial IDF probe, an IDF soldier and a civilian, who were traveling in a civilian vehicle after completing a planned operation and while outside the designated operational military area, identified several masked suspects allegedly engaged in smuggling. It is unclear if and to what extent the civilian was involved in IDF operations.
The civilian then opened fire at the suspects’........