Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
Every Israeli hostage story is different in its details, but what unites them all is the savagery and cruelty of their captors. Some of them keep quiet when they return to Israel. It was all so sordid. They are embarrassed to talk. Others think the world should know. In the latter category is Romi Gonen. More of her story can be found here: “‘If you tell anyone, I’ll kill you’: Ex-hostage Romi Gonen recounts captors’ repeated sexual assaults,” by Leon Kraiem, Times of Israel, December 26, 2025:
Former hostage Romi Gonen shared that she was sexually assaulted by four different men on separate occasions during her 471 days as a hostage in Gaza, speaking in an interview that aired on Thursday.
The sit-down on Channel 12’s “Uvda” program detailed her harrowing ordeal, beginning with her abduction from the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, when she was 23 years old.
Gonen, now 25, detailed being taken into the Strip, being moved between several private houses, and then being taken underground several weeks into the war. The hour-long segment is set to be followed up with more of the interview next week.
As soon as she was abducted, Gonen said, she was taken to Shifa Hospital — she’d been shot in the arm amid the Hamas-led terror rampage, before being kidnapped — and already there, she was abused.
As a woman, presumably a 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.”
“I was just there, with some 15 people touching me, at the same time. Until it got to the point they were tearing off all my clothes, but I lay there naked. It was like an out-of-body experience, where you’re seeing everything from above,” she said. “I was sure I was going to wake up without an arm.”
When she came to, she was taken to the first house of her captivity.
Gonen said that, when she speaks about her time in Gaza, she imagines people all wonder: “‘Did they harass you?’ And people don’t ask that question.”
“I also wouldn’t ask, if I were you. But also, I think no one asks because no one wants to hear the answer,” she said.
“I went through all kinds of assaults, from four different men, over the course of my captivity. Different levels of severity.”…
The thousands of Hamas-led terrorists who invaded southern Israel from Gaza on October 7, 2023, took 251 hostages back to Gaza, amid rampages in which some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed, amid numerous acts of brutality, overt targeting of families in their homes and revelers at a music festival, and sexual assault.
Over the course of two years, through several ceasefire-hostage deals, the hostages were either rescued by troops or released in exchange for thousands of Palestinian security prisoners, including terror convicts serving life sentences. The body of one last hostage — Police Master Sgt. Ran Gvili — remains in the Strip.
Subject to every sort of sexual assault by four captors, amid nonstop threats of violence, and real acts of violence carried out over 471 days of captivity, that she almost entirely spent deep underground, Romi Gonen came home to Israel, and as brave as she had been while enduring her calvary in Gaza, she was just as brave, or perhaps even braver, for choosing to tell her story to the world.
