Israeli Hostage Reveals Unimaginable Torture and Sexual Abuse in Gaza Captivity

By: Fern Sidman

In one of the most harrowing testimonies to emerge since the release of Israeli hostages from the Gaza Strip, 21-year-old Rom Braslavski has spoken publicly for the first time about the sexual abuse, torture, and psychological torment he endured during more than two years of captivity under Palestinian Islamic Jihad. His story, broadcast in excerpts by Israel’s Channel 13 and later detailed by The Jewish News Syndicate (JNS), has sent shockwaves throughout Israel and the broader Jewish world, reopening wounds still raw from the Hamas-led atrocities of October 7, 2023.

Braslavski, who had been working as a security guard at the Nova music festival when Hamas and its allies launched their murderous assault, was among those seized that morning and dragged across the border into Gaza. For 25 months, he disappeared into the abyss of captivity, one of the nameless and voiceless prisoners whose fate symbolized Israel’s collective anguish. His release last month—part of a U.S.-brokered ceasefire that freed the last 19 surviving hostages—was greeted with tears of joy. But as JNS reported, joy has quickly given way to horror as the details of his ordeal emerge.

In the interview excerpts, Braslavski described scenes of humiliation so depraved that they defy comprehension. His captors, he said, stripped him completely naked, tied him up, and subjected him to repeated acts of sexual violence and physical torture.

“They stripped me of all my clothes—underwear, everything. They tied me up … while I was completely naked. I was torn apart, dying, with no food,” he said, his voice breaking. “I prayed to God, ‘Please, save me, get me out of this already.’ And you just say to yourself, ‘What the f***?’”

As the JNS report noted, Braslavski’s account shatters one of the most disturbing taboos of modern warfare: the deliberate use of sexual violence as a weapon of terror. “It was sexual violence,” he said. “Its main purpose was to humiliate me. The goal was to crush my dignity. And that’s exactly what he did.”

For many Israelis, these revelations confirm what survivors and analysts had long suspected—that sexual abuse was part of the systematic brutality inflicted on hostages and victims alike during and after the October 7 massacre.

Braslavski’s recollections are suffused with disbelief at the depths of cruelty he encountered. “It’s something even the Nazis didn’t do,” he said. “During Hitler’s time, they wouldn’t have done things like this. You just pray for it to stop.”

His words, cited in the JNS report, carry both shock and theological weight in a society where Holocaust memory remains central to moral vocabulary. “Every day,” he recalled, “every beating—I’d say to myself, ‘I survived another day in hell. Tomorrow morning, I’ll wake up to another hell. And another. And another. It doesn’t end.’”

The young man, barely out of adolescence when he was taken, described captivity as a descent into a universe stripped of humanity. “I came back from meeting the devil,” he said simply.

For his mother, Tami Braslavski, the ordeal has been a living nightmare. As the JNS report recounted, she revealed that her son was held alone for nearly the entire duration of his captivity—an isolation designed to break him psychologically. His captors, she said, promised him better treatment if he would convert to Islam, an offer he refused.

“Rom’s courage, even in refusing to surrender his faith under duress, has become a point of profound pride and pain in Israel,” JNS reported. The young man’s refusal to submit to indoctrination, despite years of hunger and brutality, resonates deeply with a nation that views spiritual resistance as a sacred act of survival.

Experts interviewed by JNS have emphasized that Braslavski’s ordeal is not an isolated case but part of a broader pattern of terrorist tactics aimed at annihilating identity through shame and dehumanization. The sexual assaults against hostages and victims—long denied by Hamas and its affiliates—fit within a documented framework of psychological warfare meant to instill terror in Israeli society.

According to the information provided in the JNS report, Israeli intelligence officials believe that some captors explicitly filmed or documented such acts to use them for propaganda, an echo of the gruesome videos released in the immediate aftermath of October 7. Human rights experts have compared these tactics to those used by the Islamic State (ISIS), where sexual violence was systematically deployed as a means of control and degradation.

Braslavski’s testimony has reignited calls within Israel for a comprehensive international investigation into war crimes committed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad. JNS reported that Israeli officials are preparing to present new evidence of sexual and gender-based violence to international bodies, including the United Nations and the International Criminal Court.

“This is not just an Israeli issue,” one Israeli diplomat told JNS. “This is a moral test for the world. If the international community cannot bring itself to condemn and investigate the sexual torture of hostages, then it forfeits any claim to moral credibility.”

Women’s organizations, human rights groups, and survivor advocates have joined the call for accountability. For months, they have criticized what they view as a muted global response to sexual crimes committed against Israelis during the Hamas-led invasion. “The silence of many feminist voices worldwide has been deafening,” wrote one JNS columnist, lamenting what she described as “the politicization of empathy.”

The full interview with Braslavski is scheduled to air later this week, but its excerpts have already sparked a national conversation about trauma, resilience, and the need for justice. The JNS report observed that mental health professionals are preparing for a new wave of psychological aftershocks among survivors and families who are now reliving their own horrors through his testimony.

Israel’s Ministry of Health has announced plans to expand psychological support services for released hostages, while NGOs are organizing therapeutic retreats and trauma-response programs. “The wounds of captivity are not only physical,” JNS noted. “They are existential.”

For Rom Braslavski, recovery will be slow and uncertain. Yet his decision to speak publicly, despite the pain, is being hailed across Israel as an act of moral defiance. “By telling the truth,” wrote a JNS editorial, “he restores the humanity his captors tried to steal.”

The atrocities of October 7 remain the defining trauma of this generation of Israelis. As JNS has chronicled in exhaustive detail, the attack shattered not only physical lives but the illusion that Israel could ever fully insulate itself from barbarism. The stories of survivors such as Braslavski—men and women who endured the unendurable—now form the living archive of that day’s evil.

In their courage to speak, they bear witness not only to their suffering but to the enduring moral divide between civilization and savagery. “I came back from meeting the devil,” Rom Braslavski said—a line already etched into Israel’s collective consciousness.

As the young survivor struggles to rebuild his life, Israel and the Jewish world are left to confront a truth too painful to ignore: that evil, unmasked, still stalks the borders of human imagination. And as the JNS report observed, “the measure of our civilization will be how unflinchingly we face it—and how steadfastly we defend those who lived through its fire.”