The ordeal of Romi Gonen

 by Scott Johnson

Yesterday Israel’s Channel 12 public affairs program Uvda brodacast Romi Gonen’s first major interview following her release from Hamas captivity in Gaza in January. Sitting cross-legged without costume or script or gimmickry, Gonen stares directly across at her interviewer and fights through her darkest memories to tell us that she was raped by her captors in Gaza. From as early as the fourth day of her captivity, Gonen was assaulted. She told herself that she was facing life as “a sex slave” and there was nothing she could do to stop it. “He took everything from me,” she says.

Eve Barlow comments on the interview at her Blacklisted site in the post “Romi Gonen breaks silence.” I have borrowed from Barlow’s commentary in the paragraph above.

The video below was posted on YouTube by the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council. The Times of Israel and other Israeli outlets report on the interview, but I doubt it will be much seen in the places where we usually get our news.

The Times of Israel story adds details from the rest of the interview. For example:

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.”

Read the whole thing here.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/12/the-ordeal-of-romi-gonen.php