‘I was torn apart, dying’: Rom Braslavski says captors sexually assaulted, tortured him

Freed hostage Rom Braslavski revealed in clips of an interview aired on Wednesday that Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists who held him captive in Gaza repeatedly sexually assaulted and tortured him.

Braslavski, who was freed last month after two years in captivity in Gaza, was kidnapped on October 7, 2023, while working as a security guard at the Nova festival near Re’im, which was overrun by terrorists and was the site of a brutal massacre that left hundreds dead.

In an excerpt that the Daily Mail published of an interview with Israel’s Channel 13 news, which is due to be broadcast in full Thursday night, Braslavski said that his captors stripped him naked and tied him up, then starved him.

“I was torn apart, dying, with no food,” he was quoted as saying. “I prayed to God, ‘Please, save me, get me out of this already.’ And you just say to yourself, ‘What the fuck?’

“It was sexual violence — and its main purpose was to humiliate me,” he continued. “The goal was to crush my dignity. And that’s exactly what [they] did.”

“It’s hard for me to talk about that part specifically. I don’t like to talk about it. It’s hard. It was the most horrific thing,” Braslavski added. “It’s something even the Nazis didn’t do. During Hitler’s time, they wouldn’t have done things like this.”

Braslavski’s testimony appears to make him the first male former hostage to report being sexually assaulted in captivity, after a number of freed female captives recounted such attacks.

“You just pray for it to stop,” Braslavski said. “And while I was there — every day, every beating — 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.’”

“I came back from meeting the devil,” he said.

Braslavski was released last month along with the rest of the final 20 living hostages held in Gaza as part of a ceasefire deal with Hamas. Since then, Hamas has handed over the bodies of 22 of the 28 deceased hostages that were still held in the Strip at the time of the ceasefire.

Days after he was freed from Gaza last month, Braslavski’s mother said he had been whipped and beaten “with things that I will not even mention,” and that his captors also pressured him to convert to Islam, offering him extra food and better conditions if he did, but he resisted. They also told him, falsely, that Israelis were too weak or uninterested to protest on his behalf, while inflating the IDF’s death toll and the damage inflicted on Israel.

Israel has accused international women’s groups of failing to condemn sexual violence by Hamas and other terror groups in Gaza, even after a UN report from 2024 found “clear and convincing” evidence that Israelis were raped and sexually assaulted on Oct. 7 and in captivity.