‘I had nowhere to run’: Guy Gilboa-Dalal recounts sexual abuse by captor in Gaza

Former hostage Guy Gilboa-Dalal revealed details of the more than two years he spent in Hamas captivity, including sexual abuse he says he endured by one of his captors at gunpoint, in a lengthy interview aired by Channel 12 Saturday evening.

Gilboa-Dalal, 23, who was freed last month under the current ceasefire deal in Gaza, said he was assaulted on two occasions by the same captor, while being held along with captives Evyatar David, Tal Shoham and Omer Wenkert.

Gilboa-Dalal is the second male former hostage to publicly disclose sexual assault during Hamas captivity, following Rom Braslavski, who has spoken about similar abuse. Several released female hostages have also recounted sexual violence and threats while held in Gaza.

“On one of the days, he took me to [the terrorists’] room, and I was on a chair with my eyes covered,” said Gilboa-Dalal, describing the first incident. “He covered my eyes and said to me, ‘Oh, it’s been a long time since you saw girls, right? Do you watch porn? Want to watch porn? Want you and me to make a porn film?’”

Gilboa-Dalal continued: “He came up behind me. He started touching me all over my body, and I froze in that moment.”

“He started really touching me and kissing the back of my neck, kissing my back, and it was very, very frightening,” he continued. “I froze, and after a few minutes of him doing that — really touching me — my whole body was burning here, in the back of my neck and my throat.”

It was heartbreaking to hear the horrors recounted by Guy Gilboa Dalal, who returned from the nightmare of two years in brutal captivity by Hamas.

His willingness to speak on camera, expose his wounds, and articulate the incomprehensible cruelty to which he was subjected was an… pic.twitter.com/Ubi3cFpnnx

— יצחק הרצוג Isaac Herzog (@Isaac_Herzog) November 22, 2025

“He told me he loves me, and it was extremely disturbing,” Gilboa-Dalal continued. “At some point, his hand stopped on my chest, and my heart was beating really, really, really fast. And he asked me, ‘What, are you scared?’ So I said yes. He took me, pressed a rifle to my head and a knife to my throat, and told me that if I told anyone inside — Evyatar, Tal or Omer — or any of the other guards, he would kill me.”

“Not only did I go through that horrifying experience, but I also couldn’t tell anyone. I had to carry it on my own, inside myself,” he added.

The former hostage then described a second incident of assault, excerpts of which were shared by the Hebrew network earlier this week. Guy-Gilboa said his captor allowed him to shower, waited for him to finish, and then “grabbed [him] by force.”

“He pulled me to their room, and wouldn’t let me get dressed,” he recounted. “He also took off his own pants. I said to him: ‘You’re joking, right? This is forbidden in Islam. You’re a Muslim — these things are forbidden.’”

“I couldn’t see him; my face was turned away, and he was behind me. He rubbed his genitals against my anus for several minutes. I just froze, and I didn’t know what to do with myself in that moment. Then he took me back inside,” he said.

Guy-Gilboa said that after that point, he feared that he would be separated from the other hostages with him, potentially leading to more assaults: “If I end up alone, maybe this will become something regular. Maybe slowly it will get worse – more beatings, more violence, more invasive. And that terrified me because in my situation, I had nowhere to run,” he said.

However, he said, that was the last time he suffered sexual assault in captivity, as “there wasn’t another incident where he was alone without the supervision of the other terrorists, the guards from that group. But it was always, always in my mind every time I saw him — just hoping that situation wouldn’t happen again.”

Paraded, humiliated and starved

Also in the interview, Gilboa-Dalal revealed further details of the time he spent in Hamas captivity, during which he says he and fellow hostages endured deliberate starvation and physical abuse.

Gilboa-Dalal recalled being abducted from the Nova music festival during Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre, saying he and fellow hostages Evyatar David, Bar Kuperstein and Omer Wenkert were thrown into the back of the same truck and driven into Gaza.

Once inside, “they drove us around the city. They would stop, shout in Arabic: ‘Jewish prisoners! Pigs!’” he recalled. “And crowds of civilians came and started beating us. And when it got too extreme, the terrorists would fire shots into the air to push them back, then drive to the next place – and it would just continue again.”

Gilboa-Dalal said the initial stage of captivity “was horrible,” and that he would “cry all day long.” For much of his captivity, he was held along with Wenkert, David and Shoham in what he describes as a cramped, gray tunnel space, about 1.8 meters (six feet) high, where movement was extremely limited.

The former hostage said he worked constantly to keep his “mind active,” trying to learn Arabic from his captors, even telling them that he wanted to convert to Islam, in an effort to “maintain as good a relationship as possible” with them and to gather “any information possible.”

He said that a camera watched them almost constantly in captivity, and he coped by imagining it was recording messages for his family and future children: “I imagined I was teaching them how to survive, how to stay strong in captivity…instead of this livestream going to the terrorists.”

According to Gilboa-Dalal, he and his fellow hostages were intentionally starved, receiving food only once every 24 hours, usually a small piece of pita with a tiny amount of food on the side, despite additional food being available to the captors.

“What we did was save whatever food they gave us, set it aside, and wait until the next time they brought food, just to be sure we’d have something. So every day when we finally ate, we were eating food that was already 24 hours old – spoiled,” he said.

He said the behavior of the guards in captivity was unpredictable, saying: “They could be normal for a period, and then suddenly incredibly cruel.”

On one occasion, he said, the same guard who sexually assaulted him during captivity taunted and beat him and Wenkert.

“He put a mask on me, like a COVID mask,” he said. “He told me: ‘Now you stand here, you’re not allowed to move.’ Then he told Omer: ‘Get on all fours like a dog and rest like a dog.’ And he went out. Then he came back, grabbed me, threw me on top of Omer, and he started beating us, really beating us. He started punching us and kicking us.”

After Gilboa-Dalal recounted the two incidents of sexual assault, the interviewer asked him how he survived despite the hardships he faced in captivity.

He responded: “We had to keep surviving. We had to keep being strong… It’s possible to break, and it’s okay to break, and it’s okay to cry – but I couldn’t allow myself to lose it there.”

He continued: “There were three things I held onto to stay strong and not fall apart: That I was being filmed for my family, that they were seeing me, that my future children were seeing me, and that I would stay strong and show them that everything happens for a reason.”

‘We were each other’s anchor’

Gilboa-Dalal also commented on how he and Evyatar David, who were childhood best friends before being kidnapped together, helped each other survive captivity.

“We were each other’s anchor. It was so, so important that we were together,” he said. “That was what lifted us the most.”

He said their relationship reached a new level around the time of the August video that Hamas released, where David — appearing in an extremely emaciated state — was forced to dig his own grave. He said that they were held together at that time, and that he was sitting behind the curtain that appears in the video, in an equally emaciated state.

“My muscle mass had dropped so dramatically that I couldn’t move my shoulders… I couldn’t do anything. To the point where Evyatar would pull down and lift up my pants for me,” he said.

“When I went to the bathroom, he would cover me so we wouldn’t freeze. We had nothing on our bodies to warm ourselves,” he continued. “So it got to the point where I’d give him wet wipes, and he would wipe me here [around the armpit], because I couldn’t lift my shoulder from how weak I was, because I had no energy left.”

“That’s what it means to be each other’s anchor,” he said.

Asked about what it means to be back home, he said: “Things take on a different meaning now.”

“Things that I once took for granted… Every moment with my family has felt incredible since [returning], and it will stay that way forever,” he said.