|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
Every Israeli hostage story is different in its details, but what unites them all is the savagery and cruelty of their captors. Some of them keep quiet when they return to Israel. It was all so sordid. They are embarrassed to talk. Others think the world should know. In the latter category is Romi Gonen. More of her story can be found here: “‘If you tell anyone, I’ll kill you’: Ex-hostage Romi Gonen recounts captors’ repeated sexual assaults,” by Leon Kraiem, Times of Israel, December 26, 2025:
Former hostage Romi Gonen shared that she was sexually assaulted by four different men on separate occasions during her 471 days as a hostage in Gaza, speaking in an interview that aired on Thursday.
The sit-down on Channel 12’s “Uvda” program detailed her harrowing ordeal, beginning with her abduction from the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, when she was 23 years old.
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.”…
The thousands of Hamas-led terrorists who invaded southern Israel from Gaza on October 7, 2023, took 251 hostages back to Gaza, amid rampages in which some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed, amid numerous acts of brutality, overt targeting of families in their homes and revelers at a music festival, and sexual assault.
Over the course of two years, through several ceasefire-hostage deals, the hostages were either rescued by troops or released in exchange for thousands of Palestinian security prisoners, including terror convicts serving life sentences. The body of one last hostage — Police Master Sgt. Ran Gvili — remains in the Strip.
Subject to every sort of sexual assault by four captors, amid nonstop threats of violence, and real acts of violence carried out over 471 days of captivity, that she almost entirely spent deep underground, Romi Gonen came home to Israel, and as brave as she had been while enduring her calvary in Gaza, she was just as brave, or perhaps even braver, for choosing to tell her story to the world.
The actual shocking and horrifying videos should be played for all to see.
Agreed Sword. I’m not sure I would view them, but keeping them hidden is a mistake and gives opportunity to those who wish to claim it never happened.
Like they try to do in denying the Holocaust.
Eisenhower insisted that the local townspeople, AND ORDERED HIS OWN SOLDIERS, walk through and see the concentration camps, smell the stench of rotting bodies, and see the mountains of corpses and starving, barely-alive survivors because, he said with remarkable wisdom and clairvoyance, “Some day people will deny that this ever happened.”
Well, incredibly, that day is NOW. But the eyewitness testimonies, the undeniable photographic documentation, and the Nuremberg Trials’ proof, are all dismissed by today’s hard Left, which encompasses not just the few lunatic “neo-Nazis” but all of the political (and media) Left.
I’m sorry, I actually disagree. It would be like reliving the horrors. I fear the gawkers and exploiters would trivialize and sexualize this monstrosity as has been done to the Holocaust films. I also fear the elevation of not only the Hamas terrorists, but Gazan civilians, including children, who eagerly participated in the bloodlust.
How else do you make this savagery undeniable? How do you, in silence, evidence the internalized screams felt while these monsters pretended there was a pleasure to their humiliating sexual violations committed again and again and sandwiched between their arrogant questions, “was I good?”as though living in a state of abject terror produces pleasure under threat of death and being helpless to leave?
While surviving, the myriad emotions being repeatedly experienced soon crystallize into only that which furthers survival. A soul becoming detached in order to endure these flagrant acts designed to destroy them.,
There are already monsters among us who have, sourced by their oft hidden barbarity, the most distorted presentations of this yet those who have their hearts and humanity intact need to face this horrific reality. We can no longer ascribe a moral superiority to those claiming this kind of abhorrent sexual violation as horrific while being too cowardly to face the experiential reality of those who have endured this.
This is also being evidenced in Pakistani Muslim migrant, grooming gangs raping young white girls and young women while the government in Britain collectively hides this vicious, soul destroying violation making excuses for this savage barbarity.
Human beings find squarely facing this easy to avoid and yet it is through facing it that the veneer of civility these monsters fabricate is burned ineeeto ashes and the victims are afforded the tentative beginning of justice and healing.
If you find it too difficult to watch, how will you ever begin to understand the devastation exacted upon the innocent and their very real need to know someone is willing to listen to the unlistenable and view the horrors committed against them in a sadistic frenzy so they can comprehend that anyone actually cares about the depths of their suffering and the internal courage necessary to save the most precious and unique essence of who they are?
May G-d watch over her, protect her, give her strength, and surround her with all the love and support she needs. May he lift her up, comfort her, and show a path forward out of the demonic darkness she endured. May he give her family strength and courage as they help her on this journey back to life.
I remember her Mom speaking many times about Romi, praying she be returned. After she was released, I think I remember reading she needed some kind of abdominal surgery among so many other things and there was no further word of her.
And now, here is Romi, so very young in years, who has survived the unthinkable, sharing her story with the world.
It is impossible to even fathom, but here she is. Baruch Hashem.
With continued prayers for her healing…. May she be forever blessed…
I wonder how many “progressives” would regard her as being an evil “oppressor” because she was Jewish.
There it is, Boyd. A good question, and one to which we all know the answer.
Legitimate armies or soldiers do not rape, take hostages, or machine-gun terrified, cowering families to death. Nor roast babies in microwave ovens. Nor send videos of their atrocities back to their (i.e. the terrorists’) cheering families ‘back home’ to enjoy and grin over.
Hamas, and the great majority of Gazans who cheer them on to these hideous, murderous war crimes, don’t agree with these simple, civilized rules of war, regardless of however else brutal and bloody.
I have ZERO sympathy or empathy for the “Gazans” or the “Palestinians” who egg-on their brothers, sons, fathers, and husbands who commit these sadistic outrages…or who willingly hold hostages prisoner in their own “civilian” homes, as we know many of them did, and do.
In the immediate aftermath of WW II and for several years afterwards, we knew how to deal with war criminals–at the top of the scaffold, with Master Sergeant James C. Woods’s (intentionally botched?) noose.
It’s time to apply that style of Justice again.
In Islam, legitimate armies DO rape. It was brilliant (and evil) on mohammed’s part—I’m talking about the mohammed who had multiple wives and married a six-year old–to tell his warriors they could rape the infidels.
The quran even includes a verse about the permissibility of a man to hit his wife. Laughably, the footnotes in the quran sent to me by CAIR includes a footnote about this. Muslim scholars disagree about the severity of the hitting, with some suggesting the hitting should only be symbolic, and I quote “as with a toothbrush.”
Religions cannot act; people can be inspired by their religion to act. Clearly, islam has inspired an incredibly amount of violence. President Bush was either lying or demonstrating extreme ignorance when he referred to terrorist hijacking a peaceful religion.
Israel should execute murderers, not give them “life sentences” so they can be traded for hostages.
They should try them for murder and genocide if the invader participated or helped plan the Oct 7 invasion. 100% death sentence for the rest of their lives. They are treating them like soldiers and prisoners of war.
They could at least infect them with lethal and communicable diseases before releasing them.
ADDENDUM AND CORRECTION TO MY POST ABOVE: Please forgive me. The Nuremberg Hangman’s name was MSgt. JOHN C. Woods, not James.
Jihadis should be forced to watch this. Before we crucify them.
They are animals who would feed off her pain. Do AI of their families and then crucify/ISIS them.
Just proved that Islam Is Not the Religion of Peace its Stone Age 7th Century backwards group of Maniacs from the 7th Century living here in the 21st Century