Former hostage Romi Gonen said that Hamas’s current commander in the Gaza Strip, Izz al-Din al-Haddad, told her at the end of the November 2023 ceasefire that she would be prioritized for release as long as she didn’t tell anyone that her captors sexually assaulted her.

Later, Haddad used Gonen and fellow hostage Emily Damari as human shields for 35 days, Gonen told Channel 12 in an interview whose second and final part aired Thursday.

When Damari, Gonen and Doron Steinbrecher were released at the start of the second truce-hostage deal in January 2025, Haddad showed up in person to escort them, and told Gonen he had fulfilled his end of their deal and expected her to do the same, Gonen said.

Gonen, 25, said she waited to speak publicly about the assaults until all the living hostages were out of Gaza so that they wouldn’t be punished by their captors.

The last 20 living hostages were released on October 13 as part of the third and current ceasefire, 738 days after they were abducted when Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel on October 7, 2023, to kill some 1,200 people and take 251 hostages, sparking the war in Gaza.

Gonen, who was 23 at the time, was abducted from the Reim-area Nova music festival.

In the first episode of her Channel 12 interview, which aired last week, she recounted being assaulted by four different men throughout her captivity — three of them within a month of her abduction, before she met any fellow hostages in Gaza.

One of those three captors, named Mohammed, threatened her after the worst assault that he would kill her if she told anyone, Gonen said. Immediately after that assault — on November 8, 2023, day 34 of the war — Gonen was moved from Mohammed’s house to an underground cell.

“I was there for 24 hours, alone, in crushing silence,” she said, in tears, in the interview episode that aired on Thursday. “I had to be alone with it, and it’s not easy.”

She was then joined........

© The Times of Israel