Ilana Gritzewsky says she woke up from her abduction half naked, with seven terrorists around her.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
Former hostage Ilana Gritzewsky told of being sexually assaulted by Hamas terrorists during her 55-day captivity in the Gaza Strip in an interview published on Tuesday in The New York Times.
Gritzewsky was kidnapped after fleeing from the home she shared with her boyfriend, Matan Zangauker, in Kibbutz Nir Oz, after terrorists broke in and started shooting during their invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023.
She was thrown onto a motorcycle and taken into Gaza, sandwiched between two terrorists, with her head covered so she could not see where they were going, she said.
“The men pinned her leg to the exhaust pipe, burned her, and … one of the kidnappers sitting behind her groped her and touched her breast under her shirt and her legs,” the report said, before she fainted from the pain of the burns the hot pipe was causing.
When she regained consciousness, she attested, she found that she was on the floor with her pants down and shirt above her breasts, which were exposed.
Although she did not know what happened to her before she awoke, she quickly told them she was menstruating.
At that point, she said, “They hit me and lifted me up. I felt they were disappointed.”
“I don’t think I have ever been so thankful for my period,” she added, in the firm belief that this saved her from a far worse assault.
Gritzewsky also recounted how one of her captors had touched her breasts, hugged her at gunpoint, and said that even if a hostage deal would work out, she would not be freed because he wanted to marry her so she could have his children.
Gritzewsky was, in fact, released in the first hostage deal along with over 80 Israeli women and minors, some seven weeks after the Hamas-led terrorists slaughtered 1,200 people and abducted 251, including Zangauker, who is still in captivity.
Regarding her physical abuse, she attested that she found out she had had her hip broken by her captors only after she came home.
In August, the former hostage described to the Yediot Ahronot newspaper other physical abuse she had undergone in the various places she was held, including Gazan hospitals, private homes and a tunnel.
“During the kidnapping, they threw a grenade, there were shots near my ear, I was beaten on the head. It got worse in captivity, with the shelling I heard from the place where I was being held. You hear everything. There are shock waves,” she said, noting that she now has to use a hearing aid.
“I also have an injury to my pelvis and thigh and I’m doing physical therapy. Every morning I look at the mark I have on my leg, the burn from the exhaust of the motorcycle I was kidnapped on. They marked me,” she said.
She told the Hebrew-language daily that she only sleeps one to two hours a night and is consumed by the question of why she was lucky enough to be freed when others weren’t.
However, she said she takes it as a sign that “God wanted me to lift my voice to help those who are still alive achieve their freedom, and get the bodies back for an honorable burial.”
She and Zangauker’s mother, Einav, are leaders of the mass protests pushing to save all the 59 remaining hostages, 22-24 of whom are still believed to be alive, no matter the price that Hamas demands.
Recuperating in full will have to wait until her mission is complete, she told the Times.
“I’m not really available for my own rehabilitation, not for the body and not least for the soul,” Gritzewsky said.
Israelis of all stripes and Jews around the world are furious with international human rights organizations and especially women’s groups over their almost-complete silence regarding the sexual assaults ex-hostages have reported and the concrete evidence of mass rapes and other sexual brutalities Hamas and other terrorists inflicted on many of their victims as they murdered them on October 7.
