A young woman held captive by Hamas for more than a year revealed her deep-seated fear that her captors would use her as a “sex slave” after repeated sexual assaults — and said they promised her an early release for her silence.
But now Romi Gonen, 25, is defiantly breaking her silence.
“They often silenced my story and told me not to tell it. Now I am here, sitting in front of the camera, and honestly, no one will silence me anymore,” she bravely told CNN Sunday.
Gonen was taken hostage by Hamas terrorists during the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023. At just 23 years old, she was carted from one hideout to another in Gaza — and frequently abused to appease the terrorists’ abhorrent whims.
After 471 days in captivity, she was one of the first three Israeli hostages released as part of the Israel-Hamas cease-fire deal.
Gonen revealed in an interview with CNN that she was one of many hostages who suffered horrific sexual assaults at the hands of their Hamas captors.
She told the outlet that the first assault was just a few days into her capture. She was in total solitary confinement for the first 34 days and would only see her captors on occasion — including a pseudo medic who treated a gunshot wound she sustained to her arm during the Oct. 7 attack.
The supposed medic followed Gonen into the shower one day and brutally assaulted her under the pretext of treating her injury.
“He was a ‘nurse’ so he allowed himself to ‘help me.’ I was wounded, powerless, and couldn’t do anything. He took everything from me. And I had to continue living with him in that house afterward,” she told the outlet.
There was a 16-day stretch where Gonen said two men named Ibrahim and Mohammed repeatedly harassed and threatened her.
“I’m sitting on the bed. Ibrahim comes and sits next to me and harasses me. Everything is in complete silence. I start crying insanely, and he says, ‘Be careful. If you don’t calm down, I’ll get angry’,” she told the outlet.
“And that’s how the days go by: I go to the bathroom and Mohammed follows me. I sit on the toilet pulling down my pants with one hand, so he won’t see anything. Ibrahim keeps bothering me endlessly, touching my leg and thigh. I kick them off.”
In another instance, Gonen told the outlet she was forced into a bathroom by one of her captors, who followed her inside and assaulted her.
“I was crying like crazy, and he was having the time of his life, ecstatic, as if he had received the gift of a lifetime,” Gonen said.
The then-23-year-old said she couldn’t help thinking to herself: “Romi, everyone in Israel thinks you’re dead, and you’re going to be his sex slave for life… Then he comes up to me, puts a gun to my head, and tells me, ‘If you tell anyone, I am going to kill you.’”
At a certain point, the endless harassment became so apparent that senior Hamas commanders were made aware.
Gonen said she was led through a tunnel and put on the phone with Izz a Din al-Haddad, then head of the Hamas Gaza Brigade, and now the group’s Gaza leader.
She told the outlet she could recall being offered “some kind of deal. ‘I will put you at the top of the release list, and in return, you will promise me that you will keep quiet.’”
“They often silenced my story and told me not to tell it. Now I am here, sitting in front of the camera, and honestly, no one will silence me anymore. It happened to me, and it was terrible, and I deal with the consequences every day, but I am here. I beat it. I am in the aftermath, and I am much stronger than it,” she told the outlet.
Thirteen other women and two men confirmed they had also experienced or witnessed sexual violence while being held hostage in Gaza, according to a July 2025 report by the Dinah Project.
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