After months of captivity in the fetid tunnels of Gaza, a hostage quickly learned that a pause in the fighting that offered respite for his captors meant only new horrors for him.
Emboldened by a temporary cease-fire in January 2025, the Hamas militants who had been standing guard over four Israel hostages decided it was safe to emerge into the sunlight and leave just one of them at a time in charge in the tunnel.
That left the hostages at the mercy of a temperamental captor they had nicknamed Amon, said one of the Israelis, Guy Gilboa-Dalal.
One day, Mr. Gilboa-Dalal said, Amon led him blindfolded to the captors’ room, saying that Hamas had information about an Israeli spy who resembled him. The spy, he claimed, had a tattoo on his leg. Amon removed Mr. Gilboa-Dalal’s pants, ostensibly to check.
There was no tattoo.
Then Amon went onto his computer, complaining that he had not seen a woman in a long time, according to Mr. Gilboa-Dalal. “He asked if I wanted to watch a porn movie,” he said.
Amon moved closer.
“He came up behind me and began touching me, kissing the back of my neck, putting a hand on my chest,” Mr. Gilboa-Dalal said. “I froze.”
When it was over, Amon warned his captive to say nothing about what had happened or else he would be killed.
Mr. Gilboa-Dalal was one of about 250 people taken hostage on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas led the assault on southern Israel that set off the war in the Gaza Strip. The hostages were released periodically in exchange for Palestinians imprisoned in Israel. The final 20 still alive, who included Mr. Gilboa-Dalal, were released last October, when the cease-fire now in effect began.
Hamas officials, who have denied accusations of sexual violence and sexual abuse in the past, did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
But several former female hostages and at least one other male captive have reported being sexually abused in Gaza. The United Nations reported in March 2024 that it had found “clear and convincing information” of “rape and sexualized torture” committed against some of the hostages. Amnesty International, too, has documented evidence that some captives were subjected to physical and sexual violence.
In a December interview with Israel’s Channel 12 Uvda program, a former hostage, Romi Gonen, recounted being sexually assaulted by four captors on separate occasions. The most grievous assault, she said, took place in a bathroom and lasted about half an hour.
Mr. Gilboa-Dalal gave his account to The New York Times at his home in Alfei Menashe, a settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, several weeks after his release on Oct. 13. He decided to speak out, he said, because he wanted to support other victims of sexual abuse and to show them that they were not alone and had nothing to be ashamed of.
He said he also wanted to debunk Hamas’s claims that it had treated its captives well and had adhered to Islamic principles.
Like other hostages who have spoken of their ordeal, Mr. Gilboa-Dalal described constant hunger, fear and beatings, as well as narrow escapes from Israeli bombings.
He was 22 when he was kidnapped from the Nova music festival. He had recently taken a job at a soft-drink company after completing his obligatory military service in the Israeli Navy’s missile ship fleet, and had gone to the festival with three companions. Two were killed, and one, a childhood friend named Evyatar David, was taken hostage with him.
After his capture, he said, he was bound and paraded through Gaza, beaten at every turn. Throughout his first week in captivity, he was told to face the wall.
“I lost all connection to the real world,” he said. “You couldn’t choose what to eat, when to go to the toilet. It was forbidden to speak.”
After two weeks, his blindfold came off, but his legs remained shackled. Over the next eight months, he said, he was frequently moved between buildings, at times as they shook from Israeli bombardment.
In June 2024, after the Israeli military rescued four other hostages nearby, Mr. Gilboa-Dalal’s captors told him he was being moved to the home of a rich doctor, with air conditioning, television and plenty of food, he said. Instead, he was hidden in an ambulance and, after a 20-minute drive, dragged down into the tunnels.
He spent the next 16 months there with Mr. David and two other hostages, Tal Shoham and Omer Wenkert, in what he called “inhuman conditions.”
Their narrow section of the corridor was just high enough to stand in, he recounted, but only about 30 inches wide. The toilet was a pit that writhed with worms and swarmed with flies that landed on their food.
They cleaned themselves with a bucket of dirty water and a plastic bottle. Sometimes there was a light on 24 hours a day; other times they sat in pitch darkness. A locked steel door separated them from their captors’ quarters.
Among the militants, Amon — nicknamed after a character in an animated television series — was perhaps the most unsettling.
After the first sexual assault, Mr. Gilboa-Dalal dreaded that Amon would abuse him again, but he kept the experience to himself.
“He put a knife to my throat and a gun to my head and said, ‘If you tell anyone, I’ll kill you,’” Mr. Gilboa-Dalal recalled.
A few days later, Amon took the hostages to bathe one by one. When it was Mr. Gilboa-Dalal’s turn, his captor prevented him from dressing and dragged him back to his room. There, Mr. Gilboa-Dalal said, Amon threw him onto a mattress on the floor and began rubbing his penis against his anus for what seemed like 15 to 20 minutes.
“I froze again,” he said. “Should I resist? I didn’t manage to make a sound.”
Mr. Gilboa-Dalal tormented himself with thoughts of whether he was somehow to blame or could have done something to prevent it. “How many times will it happen? How will it end?” he recalled asking himself. “I had nowhere to go. I was in their hands.”
Aware that Mr. Shoham and Mr. Wenkert were set to be released during the cease-fire, he decided to confide in Mr. Shoham. He asked his fellow hostage — a father of two and the oldest of the group — to tell his parents what had happened to him if he did not get out alive. He was worried that he might be killed if he resisted a more violent sexual assault.
Mr. Shoham confirmed Mr. Gilboa-Dalal’s account of their harsh treatment in captivity. He said in an interview that while he did not witness the sexual assaults, Mr. Gilboa-Dalal told him about them in detail by using a wet wipe to write on a grimy plastic plate, in case their captors were listening.
After being released in February, Mr. Shoham said he discreetly told senior Israeli officials about the abuse and the unstable guard to underscore the danger the remaining captives were in.
The day Mr. Shoham was released, Mr. Gilboa-Dalal was forced to appear in a Hamas propaganda video showing him and Mr. David being compelled to watch from a van as their former tunnel mates were freed. They begged for their lives on camera before being taken back underground.
Mr. Gilboa-Dalal said that a seemingly professional Hamas videographer who spoke Hebrew well had told them what to say, but that the sentiment was genuine.
Mr. Gilboa-Dalal and Mr. David were told that if the cease-fire deal continued, they would also be freed soon. But Israel resumed fighting in March, and the two friends remained in Gaza.
They were no longer left alone with Amon, but for the next three months, Mr. Gilboa-Dalal said, “they starved us in the extreme.” With the cease-fire over, Israel had imposed a total blockade on Gaza to press Hamas into making further concessions, plunging Gaza into hunger, though Mr. Gilboa-Dalal said his captors always seemed to have enough to eat.
In an apparent effort to shock Israel into reaching another deal, Hamas released a video in August showing a skeletal Mr. David in a tunnel digging a hole that he said would be his grave. Mr. Gilboa-Dalal said he was just behind the scene and in the same emaciated state as Mr. David.
After the video was released, the hostages were given more food. But by then, Mr. Gilboa-Dalal said, he was so weak from muscle loss that he could not move his arms without screaming in pain.
Mr. Gilboa-Dalal now has a long process of physical and mental rehabilitation ahead. His family is trying to raise money for his recovery through crowdfunding, as others are doing for many of the released hostages.
In the tunnels, he said, he told his captors he was interested in becoming a Muslim, to try to build rapport, and they taught him how to pray as one. “I was playing the game,” he said.
But all the while, he said, like some other hostages, he was finding comfort and strength in the Jewish faith and quietly mouthing his own prayers.
“I developed a very strong belief that everything happens for a reason from the Creator, even if we don’t know what it is,” he said. “I am not sure we ever know.”
Isabel Kershner, a senior correspondent for The Times in Jerusalem, has been reporting on Israeli and Palestinian affairs since 1990.
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