On Thursday, Romi Gonen, one of the first of the October 7 hostages freed from Hamas captivity in 2024, broke her silence on what transpired during the 471 days she was imprisoned. Gonen sat down for the Israel Channel 12 "Uvda" program and detailed the rapes and torture she endured at the hands of her captors. After a year, in opening up about this trauma, Gonen combats the lies Hamas peddles that they did not use rape as a controlling tool in their act of war. An X post promoting the Uvda interview read:
"The whole point is that we're here to open up all the things I haven't opened up until now": A year has passed since Romi Gonen was released from captivity, and until now - she hasn't spoken. On Thursday, "Fact" in a special project with a brave and exceptional testimony that needs to be heard - precisely now
On Wednesday, Israel's Knesset moved forward with a government-led inquiry into October 7 and voted to empower parliament members to choose who would be on the panel, as well as its inquiry and direction. Hamas chose to counter by releasing a revised version of their document: “Our Narrative… Al-Aqsa Flood: Two Years of Steadfastness and the Will for Liberation,” which, according to the Jerusalem Post, continues to peddle among its lies that there was no sexual violence against Israeli hostages.
In early 2024, Hamas published “Our Narrative: Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” which gave its version of events surrounding the October 7 massacre and the Israel-Hamas War.
That document was circulated widely online and in print. It was reported to have been distributed on college campuses in the United States and Europe, where it appeared in student forums and protest settings.
It was criticized for disputing or omitting widely documented accounts of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians and for framing them in ideological and political terms.
Hamas’s continued use of the term “Al-Aqsa Flood” reflects the same framing in the new document.
In the new document, Hamas did not address specific allegations regarding civilian killings, sexual violence, or hostage-taking during the October 7 massacre.
Read More: Trump to Make Year-End Peace Push That Even the Nobel Committee Will Find Hard to Ignore
Gonen's harrowing account destroys this lie. In the video interview, she related her ordeal with clarity, cogency, and specifics that will make your stomach churn.
WATCH:
Former hostage Romi Gonen is speaking out about the sexual abuse she endured while held by Palestinian terrorists in Gaza.
— Ari Hoffman 🎗 (@thehoffather) December 26, 2025
She was assaulted by 4 different men, including a doctor assigned to treat her injuries & a cameraman who filmed her for propaganda
Feminist & human rights… pic.twitter.com/z8aLvfAkof
Former hostage Romi Gonen is speaking out about the sexual abuse she endured while held by Palestinian terrorists in Gaza.
She was assaulted by 4 different men, including a doctor assigned to treat her injuries & a cameraman who filmed her for propaganda
Feminist & human rights orgs knew & were silent or backed Hamas
Gonen said in this segment that she had been raped FOUR times previously to the incident related in the video. The Times of Israel shed more light on Gonen's account of the other rapes and assaults that led to the one where she had a gun held to her head.
Former hostage Romi Gonen tells Channel 12’s “Uvda” program about her harrowing ordeal in Gaza. Gonen says she was sexually assaulted by four different men during her time as a hostage.
She says the first assault happened on her fourth day in captivity, the abuser being a doctor who was tasked with caring for her injuries sustained during the Hamas-led October 7 attack and her abduction.
Gonen says she was allowed to take a shower, and the man followed her in “because he’s a nurse and he came to ‘help’ me in the shower.”
“I was injured, I had no power, and I was in a situation in which I couldn’t do anything,” she says.
“He took everything from me,” she says. “Afterward, I had to continue living with him in the house.”
Gonen says her next attacker was a cameraman who filmed clips of her for propaganda purposes. When she was moved homes, she was forced to stay alone with man, Muhammad, who then began touching her. Gonen says she told him to stop and went to another room, but that the next day Muhammad told her he would be beside her from then on out. “And that’s how my ordeal in that house began,” she says.
She says that for many days, Muhammad and a second 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.’ And that’s how the days pass: I go to the bathroom and Muhammad 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. It went on for 16 days… Those were by far the worst 16 days of my captivity.”
This is only one of a number of testimonies documented not just from the freed hostages, but from the eyewitness accounts of the carnage enacted by Hamas on October 7, documented by the U.N., the Red Cross, and other human rights organizations. Yet, the Free Palestine zealots continue to double down, insisting that Hamas did not use rape to terrorize and destroy Israelis.
The professor is “noted Palestinian feminist,” Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who has argued Hamas didn’t kill babies or rape women on Oct. 7, and “retired” from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem after she was suspended, arrested, and briefly detained for incitement to terrorism. pic.twitter.com/CMieHN23a9
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) November 7, 2025
This radical professor did get this point right: Women's bodies — particularly Israeli women like Gonen — were used as political weapons. Yet she and her ilk continue to deny, peddle Hamas propaganda, and foment hate. This only serves to supply the fodder used to justify deadly attacks like the one perpetrated against Jews at a Hanukkah celebration on Australia's Bondi Beach.
The Dinah Project’s new report confirms what many tried to deny: Hamas used rape as a weapon of war on October 7th. This was not resistance. It was systematic sexual terrorism. pic.twitter.com/CFuRCwJ76w
— Noa Tishby (@noatishby) July 8, 2025
Gonen's tremendous courage in sharing her story can only be matched by the courage to condemn and root out the antisemitism and terrorism that have been allowed to be platformed and normalized across the West for far too long.
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