Former hostage Romi Gonen said Thursday that she endured four separate incidents of sexual abuse by four different men during 471 days of captivity in Gaza. “There were different levels of severity,” she said. Speaking on the investigative TV program Uvda, she described the third incident as the most severe.
“It lasted almost half an hour,” she said. “He told me to go to the bathroom and wash myself in the sink. I was crying uncontrollably, and he was at the peak of his life, like he had received a gift for life. Until you’re in that situation, you don’t understand what happens to the body. Fear paralyzes you. I froze.”
She recounted that day in detail. “I fell asleep in the afternoon on the living room floor and woke up with Ibrahim and Mohammed talking above my head. He leaned over and told me, ‘Listen, Hamas called and told me to kill you. I asked if there was an option to keep you alive for myself, and they said yes, but we have to flee this house.’ He told me to go wash myself in the sink because he didn’t know when the next time would be. That was the first time he allowed me to go to the bathroom alone. That’s where the third assault happened — the worst of all.”
“Not much went through my mind except that I was terrified and disgusted, asking why,” she said. “There was one moment in the bathroom, when everything was happening. There was a small square window. I looked through it — the sky was blue, birds were chirping — and this was my reality. The dissonance between the beauty of life and the filth in that bathroom. I’ll never forget it. I reached the lowest point possible. When he left the bathroom and I followed, I suddenly heard ringing in my ears and couldn’t hear anything. The world felt like it was spinning. All I thought was, ‘Romi, everyone in Israel thinks you’re dead, and you’re going to be a sex slave in captivity.’”
She said the captor later checked whether she was “OK” and then threatened her. “My tears were flowing, and he asked, ‘Romi, are you OK or not OK?’ I thought to myself, ‘How can you ask me that?’ He approached with a gun and said, ‘If you tell anyone, I’ll kill you.’ I was abused — it was his last day. He did what he wanted. He had a window of opportunity, because that day I was transferred to another place,” she said.
Gonen said the first incident occurred on the fourth day of captivity, when a medical worker arrived from a hospital to treat her injured hand. “I went into the shower — and things happened. I went in to shower and he allowed himself to come in, because he was a nurse and ‘helping me.’ I was injured and had no power over them. There was nothing I could do. He took everything from me. That was just the beginning — I felt like there was nothing left of me,” she said. “And afterward I had to keep living with him in the same house.”
After the shower, she said Mohammed, whom she called “the cameraman,” arrived and filmed her first video in Gaza. “You can see everything in my eyes — that I’m in the worst possible state. The way I speak, saying, ‘I would really like to go home,’” she recalled.
The second incident also involved Mohammed, who later assaulted her again. She said the second assault took place after the start of the IDF ground maneuver, when Mohammed was guarding her. “Suddenly I felt him starting to massage me and moving down toward my waist. I told him, ‘Stop touching me! Stop touching me!’ in Hebrew, because he didn’t know English. I pushed his hand away. I got angry, took my mattress to a children’s room and went to sleep there. The next day he told me, ‘Yesterday was a one-time thing. From now on, you and I sleep mattress next to mattress. When you go to the bathroom, I go with you. Every night I’ll come and handcuff you.’”
Gonen said the harassment continued in the days that followed. “I’m sitting on the bed, Ibrahim sits next to me and harasses me. Everything happens in the room, in complete silence. I start crying uncontrollably, and he says, ‘Be careful — if you don’t calm down, I’ll get angry.’ That’s how the days pass. I go to the bathroom and Mohammed comes with me and watches. I urinate with one hand pulling down my pants, sitting so he won’t see anything. Ibrahim keeps harassing me endlessly, grabbing my leg and moving up to my thigh. I kick him. It went on for 16 days — it sounds like ‘nothing,’ but those were the worst 16 days of my captivity by far.”
She said her captors questioned her repeatedly about her sexual history. “He harassed me, asked, ‘Who did you sleep with?’ I said I had a husband. He kept asking questions about me and about ‘Yarden, my husband,’ whom I invented to make them believe I was married,” she said. “I stopped getting my period, which terrified all of us. My biggest fear was that something had been done to me. They were convinced I had slept with ‘Yarden’ the day before the festival and that I was pregnant. One day, he brought a pregnancy test. It was negative.”
First published: 23:35, 12.25.25