'All I thought was, ‘Romi, everyone in Israel thinks you’re dead, and you’re going to be a sex slave in captivity'
Romi Gonen recounts sexual abuse by her Palestinian captors in Gaza
Freed Gaza hostage Romi Gonen opened up about the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her Palestinian captors in Gaza.
"Until you're put in this situation you cannot begin to grasp what happens to the body," she said, recounting what she said was among the very worst moments of her life: her rape by a captor who took her to the bathroom of the house where she was held.
“Not much went through my mind except that I was terrified and disgusted, asking why," she recounted in an interview to the Hebrew-language Channel 12.
“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 and beastliness in that bathroom. I’ll never forget it. I reached the lowest point possible. When he stepped out of 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.’”
“I got to the living room, I sat on the chair, in a state of 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.
At that point the abuser “pressed a gun to my head and told me: ‘If you tell anyone about this, I’ll kill you.’”
Gonen, who was abducted from the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023 when she was aged 23, was freed after 471 days of captivity in Gaza. She suffered a gun wound to the hand on October 7 and said that the pain was so intense she begged her captors to amputate her hand.
She was taken to the Shifa Hospital, where a harrowing ordeal awaited her.
As 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."