A former Israeli hostage who was released last month has told Israeli TV that he was sexually assaulted during his two years in captivity in Gaza.
In an interview with Channel 13’s Hazinor programme, Rom Braslavski, 21, described being stripped naked and tied up by members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
“It was sexual violence, and its main purpose was humiliation. Its goal was to humiliate me, to crush my dignity,” he said.
He is the first man held hostage to allege publicly that he was sexually assaulted.
Warning: This article contains details some readers may find disturbing.
Rom Braslavski was on leave from his service as a soldier in the Israeli military and was working as a security guard at the Nova music festival when Hamas and allied Palestinian armed groups attacked southern Israel on 7 October 2023, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 others as hostages.
Israel responded to the attacks by launching a military campaign in Gaza that has killed more than 68,800 people, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.
Four weeks ago, Mr Braslavski was among the last 20 living Israeli hostages who were released under a US-brokered ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.
In the interview with Channel 13, broadcast late on Thursday, Mr Braslavski said his treatment by PIJ deteriorated rapidly after he had refused to convert from Judaism to Islam in March this year, which was also when the previous ceasefire collapsed.
He said he was kept blindfolded for three weeks, had stones pushed into his ears to limit his hearing, and had his rations of food and water reduced.
Then, he added, his captors received what they described as an order to torture him.
Mr Braslavski said they tied him up, punched him, and whipped him with a metal cable – and that this was repeated several times a day.
“I entered into a loop, which I doubted I would come out of alive,” he recalled.
In August 2025, PIJ posted a video in which Mr Braslavski was seen crying and saying that he had run out of food and water, was unable to stand or walk, and was “at death’s door”.
Following the publication of the video, Mr Braslavski told Channel 13, his captors also began to sexually assault him.
“They stripped me of all my clothes, my underwear, everything. They tied me up from the… When I was completely naked I was wiped out, dying without food and I prayed to God: ‘Save me, get me out of this already’,” he said.
When asked whether his captors did “more things like that”, Mr Braslavski replied: “Yes. It’s hard for me to talk about this part specifically. I don’t like to talk about it. And it’s hard. It was a horrific thing.”
He added: “You just pray to God for it to stop. And while I was there, every day, every beating, every day, I’d say to myself: ‘I survived another day in hell. Tomorrow morning, I’ll wake up to another hell. And another hell’.”
Israeli President Isaac Herzog said Mr Braslavski had shown “extraordinary courage in sharing the horrors of his captivity, including a horrific sexual assault he endured”.
“The world must understand the scale of the crimes committed by the terrorists in Gaza, heinous cruelty, sexual violence, and abuse,” he wrote on X.
At least four women held as hostages have spoken publicly about alleged incidents of sexual abuse against themselves or fellow captives, according to Reuters.
A PIJ official told Reuters news agency that Mr Braslavski’s allegation of sexual assault was “incorrect”, without elaborating.
The UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict said in March 2024 that she and a team of experts had found “convincing information” of rape and sexualised torture being committed against some hostages in Gaza. They also found reasonable grounds to believe that sexual violence occurred in multiple locations, including rape and gang rape, during the 7 October attacks. Hamas said the report’s findings were “baseless”.
A separate report by a UN commission of inquiry in March 2025 concluded that Israel had “increasingly employed sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence against Palestinians”, including “forced public stripping and nudity, sexual harassment including threats of rape, as well as sexual assault”. Israel called the allegations “unfounded”.
Last week, the former top lawyer in the Israeli military resigned after saying she was responsible for the leaking of a video that purportedly shows soldiers abusing a Palestinian detainee at a base in Israel last year. The detainee was treated for severe injuries after allegedly being stabbed in the rectum. Five soldiers have been charged over the incident.
