Rom Braslavski: I was sexually assaulted by Hamas captor

He is the first male hostage to acknowledge undergoing such abuse in Gaza.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Former hostage Rom Braslavski revealed in an interview set to air Thursday evening on the “HaTzinor” show on Channel 13 that he was sexually assaulted by his Hamas captor.

He is the first male captive to publicly acknowledge such abuse.

Parts of the interview were translated into English and sent to CNN and the Daily Mail prior to the show to publicize Hamas’ cruelty, Ynet reported.

“No one underwent what I did. They stripped me of all my clothes, my underwear, everything. They tied me up from my … while I was completely naked,” Braslavski said, pausing while passing over the obviously painful detail.

He then went on, with tears in his voice: “I was wiped out, dying, without food. And I prayed to God, ‘Save me, get me out of this already’ – and you just say to yourself … ‘What the hell is going on?’”

When asked by the interviewer if he would define his experience as sexual assault, he answered, “Unequivocally. This was sexual violence, and it had one purpose — to humiliate me,” he said softly. “The goal was to crush my dignity. And that’s exactly what he did.”

When asked if his captors had done “more things like that” to him, he answered, “Yes. It’s hard for me to talk about this part specifically. I don’t like to talk about it.”

“It’s hard. It was a horrific thing,” he said while rocking slowly back and forth in an armchair, his eyes dark.

“It’s something that [even] the Nazis didn’t do. Even during Hitler’s time they wouldn’t have done things like this…. You just pray for it to stop.”

The 21-year-old described the thoughts he had every night of his excruciating two-year ordeal.

“While I was there, every day… 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.’”

Braslavski was in the IDF but off duty and working at the Nova musical festival as a security guard when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists burst through the border on Oct. 7, 2023, and massacred almost a quarter of their 1,200 victims that day at the site in addition to taking dozens of their 251 hostages from there.

In an interview shortly after he and 19 other live hostages were freed in October as part of an American-brokered deal, his mother, Tami, told Ynet that her son had been held all by himself by Palestinian Islamic Jihad forces, a much smaller terrorist group that takes its orders directly from Iran, rather than Hamas, which is “only” a client of the Islamic Republic.

“They wanted him to convert to Islam…. They said they would compensate him with food,” if he converted, read from the Quran or fasted during Ramadan, she said, but Rom had refused.

He told his family repeatedly, “I’m a Jew. I’m strong. I’m not going to break.”

Braslavski said separately that “The only thing that gave me strength was knowing that everyone around me wasn’t Jewish and that the reason I was there was simply because I’m a Jew.”