‘If you tell anyone, I’ll kill you’: Ex-hostage Romi Gonen recounts captors’ repeated sexual assaults
25-year old, abducted from Nova rave and held in Gaza for 471 days, says Hamas gunman was ‘ecstatic’ as he abused her for 30 minutes while she wept the whole time: ‘I was paralyzed’
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.”
Romi Gonen shows a photo of her in Shifa Hospital in Gaza, in the wake of her abduction by terrorists from Israel on October 7, 2023; she is wearing a hijab, and covered in a hypothermia blanket, after having been shot in the arm and losing blood.
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.”
‘He took everything from me’: Assaulted by a supposed medic
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 anything. He took everything from me,” she said. “And I had to continue living with him in the house afterward.”
Eitan Gonen, father of Romi Gonen, poses with her picture when she was held hostage by Hamas terrorists in Gaza, March 7, 2024.
Immediately after the assault in the shower, Gonen was made to film a propaganda video for Hamas, which was never released by the terror group but has since been recovered by the IDF.
The man filming the video, named Mohammed, would go on to be the worst of the abusers she dealt with in Gaza, after she was moved to his house some two weeks into the war.
‘When you go to the bathroom, I go with you’
On the first night in that house, she was made to stay alone with him, on a mattress in the living room.
He began touching her, she said, first on her back and then moving to her waist. That time, she batted him away, and was able to grab her mattress and take it to another room, where she slept that night.
But the next day, Gonen said, Mohammed told her: “Yesterday, that was a one-time thing. From now on, no more. You and I sleep on mattresses next to each other, up against each other. When you go to the bathroom, I go with you. Every night I’m going to handcuff you.”
Her sixteen days in that house – located in the Shati camp in northern Gaza – were the worst of her entire captivity, said Gonen. For many days, both Mohammed and another 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,’” she recalled.
“And that’s how the days pass: I go to the bathroom and Mohammed 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.”
“Every night [Mohammed] slept with me,” she said, “with a gun under the pillow and an AK next to the bed. He would ask me all the time, ‘Who have you slept with? When did you sleep with them?”
Gonen said she lied to her captors and told them she had a husband, naming him after her older sister, Yarden.
Yarden Gonen, sister of hostage Romi, attends a meeting of the Knesset Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality, with Mandy Damari, mother of hostage Emily, to her left, in Jerusalem on October 28, 2024
“He’s a year older than me, we met at the restaurant we both work at, we got married a year and a half ago, and he’s the love of my life,” she said of her imaginary spouse.
‘I missed my period, and that terrified everyone’
Also while in that house, Gonen missed her period, and “that terrified everyone,” she said.
“For me, the greatest fear in my life was that they’d done something to me in those first three days, or in the hospital, and I didn’t know,” she said, referring to a period in which she’d been in and out of consciousness, due to the gunshot wound.
“They were sure that I’d slept with ‘Yarden’ the night before the [Nova] party, and so I didn’t get my period because I’m pregnant, and I explained to them it didn’t really happen. So one day he brought me a pregnancy test. And it came out negative,” she said.
Two days after that incident came the worst assault.
“I went to sleep in the afternoon, on the floor, in the living room. I woke up with Mohammed and Ibrahim talking above me. They knelt down and [Mohammed] told me: ‘Listen, Hamas just called me and they told me to kill you. I asked if there’s an option to keep you alive, for myself, and they said yes, but we have to leave this house,’” she recalled.
“He said: ‘Go to the bathroom, wash yourself in the sink, because I don’t know when you’ll be able to shower again.’ And that was the first time I went to the bathroom alone. And I went to the bathroom. Then, he came after me.”
He assaulted her for some 30 minutes, she said.
Amid worst assault, for half hour, she wept; he was ‘ecstatic’
“Until you’re in that situation, you don’t understand what happens to the body. Fear paralyzes you sometimes. And I was paralyzed,” Gonen told the interviewer.
She said she was weeping throughout the assault, while her abuser “was ecstatic. He got a gift for life.”
“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,’” she recalled.
“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.”
Afterward, she said, the world was spinning, and “all that went through my head was: ‘Romi, everyone in Israel thinks you’re dead, and you’re going to be his sex slave.’”
“I got to the living room, I sat on the chair, in pure shock – tears didn’t just roll down from my eyes, they poured, my legs were covered in water because of how the tears were flowing,” she said.
Later, she said, the abuser “pressed a gun to my head and told me: ‘If you tell anyone about this, I’ll kill you.’”
It was immediately after this assault that she was moved to her next location, underground. At this point, she said, “I understood what happened that afternoon.”
“It was his [Mohammed’s] last day [holding me], and he hadn’t planned for it to be his last day, so he managed to do everything he could before I left. He had a window of opportunity in that half-hour, and he made use of it.”
The thousands of Hamas-led terrorists who invaded southern Israel from Gaza on October 7, 2023, took 251 hostages back to Gaza, amid rampages in which some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed, amid numerous acts of brutality, overt targeting of families in their homes and revelers at a music festival, and sexual assault.
Over the course of two years, through several ceasefire-hostage deals, the hostages were either rescued by troops or released in exchange for thousands of Palestinian security prisoners, including terror convicts serving life sentences. The body of one last hostage — Police Master Sgt. Ran Gvili — remains in the Strip.
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