Former hostage retells October 7 horrors at event of Italy’s ruling party |
Freed hostage Rom Braslavski was in Italy on Sunday, at the invitation of the country’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, addressing the annual “Atreju” conference of the Italian premier’s party, the right-wing Fratelli D’Italia, in Rome.
Braslavski, now 22, was working as a security guard at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, when Hamas-led terrorists kidnapped him to Gaza. He told the audience about his experience of the massacres that day and of the conditions in which he was held for two years of subsequent captivity, until his release on October 5, 2025, as part of a US-brokered ceasefire deal.
“I saw with my own eyes the horrors, I saw one thing – a massacre. I saw young, beautiful women thrown onto the ground, riddled with bullets, their clothes torn and rivers of blood in the street, amid shouts of ‘Allahu akbar,’ which you could hear from every direction,” he said.
“I saw, in a big garbage can, a great quantity of corpses – women, elderly, children. Covered in blood. Massacred just because they were Israelis, Jews,” Braslavski recalled.
The hostage, who spoke in Hebrew with an Italian interpreter, was interviewed onstage by Ester Mieli, a Brothers of Italy senator who formerly served as spokeswoman for the Italian Jewish community and is the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor.
“Over the course of my captivity, [the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group] that held me murdered me, mentally, throughout each day. They