A recently freed Israeli hostage has publicly alleged that he was sexually assaulted during his two-year captivity in Gaza, making him the first male hostage to come forward with such claims.
In an interview broadcast Thursday night on Israel’s Channel 13 program Hazinor, Rom Braslavski, 21, recounted being stripped, bound, and repeatedly abused by members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). “It was sexual violence, and its main purpose was humiliation, to crush my dignity,” he said, describing his ordeal.
Braslavski’s testimony sheds light on the extreme conditions faced by hostages taken during the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led assault on southern Israel, which killed about 1,200 people and saw 251 others abducted, according to Israeli authorities.
Braslavski had been working as a security guard at the Nova music festival when gunmen stormed the site. He was later taken into Gaza and held by PIJ fighters for nearly two years before his release last month under a U.S.-brokered ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas.
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In the Channel 13 interview, he said his treatment worsened after he refused to convert to Islam in March 2025, around the same time a previous ceasefire collapsed.
He described being blindfolded for three weeks, having stones forced into his ears, and being starved and beaten. Later, he said, his captors received what they called “an order to torture him.”
“They tied me up, punched me, and whipped me with a metal cable — several times a day,” he recalled. “I entered into a loop I doubted I would come out of alive.”
A video posted by PIJ in August 2025 showed Braslavski visibly emaciated and pleading for help, saying he had run out of food and water. Following that, he said, the assaults escalated into sexual violence. “They stripped me of all my clothes, tied me up, and I was dying without food,” he said. “I prayed to God to save me.”
He added, struggling to describe the abuse, “It was horrific. Every day I told myself, ‘I survived another day in hell. Tomorrow will be another hell.’”
Israeli President Isaac Herzog praised Braslavski’s “extraordinary courage” in publicly describing his experience.
“The world must understand the scale of the crimes committed by the terrorists in Gaza, heinous cruelty, sexual violence, and abuse,” Herzog wrote on X.
A PIJ official told Reuters the allegation of sexual assault was “incorrect,” without elaborating.
The UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict said in March 2024 that her team had found “convincing information” that some hostages in Gaza had been subjected to rape and sexualized torture. Hamas rejected the UN findings as “baseless.”
At least four female hostages have previously reported sexual abuse during captivity, according to Reuters.