My rape hell in Gaza: ‘Sex slave’ hostage feared she was pregnant after being raped while unconscious and describes how one attacker was ‘ecstatic’ as she wept through 30-minute ordeal

A former Israeli hostage has broken her silence about the rape hell she endured in captivity, including that she became pregnant after being attacked while unconscious and feared she would die as a ‘sex slave’.

Romi Gönen, 25, was released during the second ceasefire in January, 471 days after he was kidnapped from the Nova music festival and held hostage by Hamas terrorists.

In an explosive interview on Thursday, Gonen revealed for the first time since she came clean about the sexual abuse she endured, how she was ‘ecstatic’ as she cried during a 30-minute sexual assault by an attacker.

The first attack occurred shortly after his abduction, when he was taken to Shifa Hospital after being shot in the arm during a Hamas-led terrorist attack.

‘A man started tearing all my clothes. One of them took off my shoes. Speaking to journalist Ben Shani on Channel 12’s ‘Uvda’ program, Gönen said that someone else took off my earrings from my face and another took off the jewelry from my body.

While a woman was searching for the right vein in her arm, Gönen said she was touched by a crowd in her hospital bed.

‘I was there with about 15 people touching me at the same time. I lay there naked until it got to the point where they ripped all my clothes off. “It was like an out-of-body experience where you see everything from above,” he said.

‘I was sure I’d wake up armless.’

Romi Gönen, 25, was released during the second ceasefire in January, 471 days after he was kidnapped from the Nova music festival and held hostage by Hamas terrorists.

Romi Gonen embraces her loved ones at Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan, Israel, 471 days after she was kidnapped

While Gönen was describing the time he spent as a hostage in Gaza, people around him asked: “Did they harass you?” He said he imagined himself wondering. And people don’t ask that question.’

‘I wouldn’t ask if I were you. “But I also think no one asks because no one wants to hear the answer,” he said.

‘During my time in captivity I was subjected to all kinds of attacks by four different men. ‘Different levels of violence.’

After the incident in his hospital bed, a doctor escorted him to a car, which took him to an apartment in Gaza City; It was alleged that a Palestinian medical specialist responsible for taking care of her wounds sexually assaulted her.

The incident took place on Gönen’s fourth day in captivity, when the ‘nurse’ followed him to the shower.

She was in so much pain at this point that she begged him to take her to the hospital to have her arm amputated.

‘I got in the shower and he let him get in the shower with me; because she is a nurse and she will help me in the shower.

‘I was injured and had no power over them. And I was in a situation where there was nothing I could do; “He took everything from me,” he said.

‘And then I had to continue living at home with him.’

Immediately after the attack, Gonen was forced to record a propaganda video on behalf of Hamas; This video was never released by the terrorist organization but has since been seized by the IDF.

Romi Gönen said that her kidnappers sexually assaulted her at Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza and that the injured were being treated.

Romi Gönen, pictured three days after surgery on February 28, 2025, with her friend Emily Damari (right), whom she met in captivity

Hostage Romi Gonen (right) is released while embracing her mother Merav (left) at a reception point near Kibbutz Reim in southern Israel, January 19, 2025

It was alleged that the cameraman named Muhammed sexually assaulted her in her apartment, where she moved approximately two weeks after the start of the war.

The first night at her house, she had to sleep next to him on the futon in the living room.

When it was just these two in the house, he started touching her back and then her waist.

‘Suddenly I felt him approach me and he started giving me a back massage. “Then he started moving towards my waist and I stopped him there,” he said.

‘At first I told him: ‘Stop touching me, stop touching me.’ I moved his hand away and then when I moved his hand he moved towards my waist and that’s when I got angry.

‘I stood up and told him, ‘Don’t touch me again.’

Gönen pushed him away, quickly grabbed his bed and took him to another room, where he slept that night.

But the next day he remembered Muhammad telling him: ‘Yesterday was a one-off thing. No more. You and I sleep side by side, on mattresses pressed against each other. When you go to the toilet, I’ll come with you. ‘I’ll handcuff you every night.’

Gonen said the next 16 days he spent in captivity at the house in the Shati camp in northern Gaza were the worst of the 471 days he spent as a hostage.

He said that for days, both Mohammed and another man, 20-year-old Ibrahim, attacked him.

‘Every night [Mohammed] he slept with me with a gun under my pillow and an AK-47 next to the bed. He would always ask me: “Who did you sleep with? When did you sleep with them?”‘

On another occasion, Ibrahim was sitting on her bed when he started sexually assaulting her.

‘Everything happens in complete silence in the room. I start crying like crazy. Everything is quiet and he says: “Be careful. If you don’t calm down, I’m going to get angry.”‘

He continued: ‘The days pass like this: I go to the toilet, Mohammed is next to me and watches me. I pee and pull down my pants with one hand. God forbid, I sit on the toilet so he doesn’t see me. Ibrahim continues to bother me non-stop. They grabbed my leg and moved towards my thigh. ‘I’m kicking.’

Gönen said that she lied to her kidnappers and made them believe that she had a husband, and that she named him after her older sister, Yarden.

“He’s a year older than me, we met at the restaurant where we both worked, we got married a year and a half ago, and he’s the love of my life,” she recalled telling his bodyguards.

She said that one night when she stayed at home, her period did not come and ‘it scared everyone’.

‘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 her time in hospital which she’d lost consciousness due to the gunshot wound.

‘They were sure I had slept with Yarden the night before. [Nova] I was at the party and I didn’t get my period because I was pregnant and I told them that wasn’t the case. One day she brought me a pregnancy test. “And it came back negative,” he said.

Romi Gönen, center, was released along with hostages Emily Damari (left) and Doron Steinbracher

Gönen said that after staying in Muhammed’s house for 16 days, Hamas ordered them to leave again.

‘I slept on the living room floor in the afternoon. I woke up with Muhammad and Ibrahim speaking above me. They knelt and [Mohammed] he told me: “Listen, Hamas just called me and they 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 leave this house.”

‘He said: “Go to the toilet, wash in the sink, because I don’t know when you’ll be able to shower again.”‘

This was the first time Gönen was allowed to go to the toilet alone.

But after a while, she said, Mohammed ‘came after me’ before describing how he sexually assaulted her in the bathroom for 30 minutes.

‘You don’t understand what’s happening to the body until you’re in this state, and the fear is sometimes paralyzing. And I was paralyzed. “I don’t think there was much going through my mind in those moments other than that I was really scared, really disgusted,” he said.

Recalling how he cried ‘like crazy’, Gönen said that Muhammed was ‘ecstatic’ throughout the attack.’

‘He was given the gift of a lifetime,’ he said.

Gönen continued: ‘I remember for a moment there was some kind of window there, a small square like a picture frame. I looked in the window and said to myself: ‘Oh my God. Blue skies, birds chirping, and that’s the situation I’m in right now.’

‘The dissonance between life outside, the beautiful, normal, clean life, and the filth, brutality and utter disgust experienced here in the bathroom – this is a moment in my life that I will never forget.’

After the attack, Gönen said that all he experienced was a voice saying: ‘Romi, everyone in Israel thinks you are dead and you will be their sex slave.’

He recalled the devastation he felt after the traumatic attack. ‘I went into the living room, sat on the chair in complete shock; The tears did not flow from my eyes, they flowed, my legs were covered with water because of the flowing tears.’

He then said that Muhammad threatened him to remain silent, put a gun to his head and said: ‘If you tell anyone about this, I will kill you.’

Romi Gönen took a photo with her mother Meirav 10 days after the surgery

Romi Gönen, left, photographed with Emily Damari in Kfar Aza

Gönen was released along with Doron Steinbrecher and Emily Damari during the second ceasefire between Israel and Hamas on January 19, 2025.

The 25-year-old is one of many former hostages who say they were sexually assaulted while in captivity.

The United Nations and groups such as Amnesty International have confirmed that Hamas used sexual assault as a weapon of war against hostages on 7 October and during their captivity, among other forms of abuse and torture.

The Dinah project, an independent group of leading Israeli lawyers, revealed that Hamas used sexual violence ‘as part of a genocidal plan’ to terrorize and dehumanize Israeli society during the cross-border massacre.

Approximately 1,200 people were killed in the attack on southern Israel and 251 people were smuggled into Gaza.

More than 70,600 people have since been killed in Israeli offensives in Gaza, according to the region’s Hamas-run health ministry.