Several former Hamas hostages in Gaza share accounts of sexual assault

TEL AVIV — Guy Gilboa-Dalal said he had already been held captive in the Gaza Strip for nearly 18 months when one of his Hamas captors took him from his tiny, crowded cell. The activist forced the blindfolded 24-year-old to undress and sit on a chair.

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“You haven’t seen girls in a long time, have you? Do you watch porn?” he remembers his captor asking him. “Do you want to do porn with me?”

“You’re joking, right?” » Gilboa-Dalal said he responded. “It is not allowed in Islam.”

The next 20 minutes were agonizing, he said – and terrifying. The man kissed her and touched her neck and rubbed his genitals against Gilboa-Dalal. His captor placed his hand on Gilboa-Dalal’s heartbeat and asked him if he was afraid. Then he felt the man near his neck again – this time, with a knife and a threat: “‘If you ever tell anyone about this, I will kill you.’

That first assault, as well as another a day later, lasted only a few minutes, he said. But Gilboa-Dalal, who was captured when Hamas fighters stormed the Nova music festival during the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel, still describes those moments as the worst he endured during two years of isolation, starvation and beatings amid Israeli bombing.

Gilboa-Dalal is among several former hostages, most of them women, who have spoken publicly about alleged sexual assaults by militants in the Gaza Strip. Some in Israel accuse United Nations observers and human rights groups of downplaying the issue. Hamas denied that its militants committed sex crimes during or after the attack.

There have also been numerous allegations of sexual assault against Palestinians detained in Israel, including the alleged 2024 gang rape of a man in Israel’s notorious Sde Teiman military prison. Five Israeli reservists have been charged with aggravated assault and battery. They denied the accusations and the case was dropped in March.

Since October 7, 2023, an Israeli soldier has been convicted of torturing a Palestinian detainee, according to Amnesty International.

Gilboa-Dalal was released in October as part of the U.S.-brokered ceasefire, which included the stipulation that all hostages be returned to Israel and that approximately two thousand Palestinian men, women and children held by Israel were to return to Gaza. He says his excruciating thoughts persist, however, mainly during restless sleep, when his mind replays the alleged assaults over and over.

“And it’s so real. It’s so real,” he said.

“When I was sexually assaulted, it wasn’t just that I had to go through it: I was alone and I couldn’t share it with anyone,” he said. “Those thoughts I was having at that moment were really destroying my brain. Maybe it was my fault. Maybe this will last forever and maybe it will eventually kill me. I’m stuck here in this tunnel. I have nowhere to run.”

The same guard struck again a few days later. After a particularly severe beating, the guard forced him and his fellow hostages to take showers. But as Gilboa-Dalal walked out, he said, the guard held him down, refused to let him get dressed, threw him on a couch and began sexually assaulting him.

“I don’t know exactly how long because my brain kind of switched off,” Gilboa-Dalal said. “Then he told me again: ‘If you ever say that to anyone, I’m going to kill you.'”

Fear for his life kept him from speaking openly about his ordeal in captivity, Gilboa-Dalal said. Talking about it now has become a kind of catharsis.

“I had to keep it to myself for so long, and now when I talk about it, I feel like it’s important to my healing too,” he said.

He hopes his story will give voice to other victims – survivors who, like him, have struggled to deal with lingering feelings of fear, violation and helplessness.

The hostages found ways to cope with the possibility of being attacked. Amit Soussana, 42, for example, said she took a sanitary towel with her into the bathroom to try to deter potential attackers.

“I tricked him into thinking the period continues,” she said in “Screams Before Silence,” a 2024 documentary directed by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s former chief operating officer. “I did it for about a week until I couldn’t lie anymore.”

Then the guard entered his shower armed.

“The gun was pointed at me and he was panting and breathing terribly and he had a face like a monster, like a beast,” she said. “And then he forced me to perform a sexual act on him.”

Many believed they had to choose between silence or death: the militants were keen to hide their crimes, even from their comrades.

Another former hostage, Romi Gonen, 25, told Israel’s Channel 12 last month that she was repeatedly raped by several men during her two years in captivity.

“I was hurt, I had no power,” she told the documentary “Uvda”. “All that came to my mind was, ‘Romi, everyone in Israel thinks you’re dead and going to be a captive sex slave.’ »

In December 2023, she said a senior Hamas official offered to give her priority in the next hostage release if she remained silent about the abuse.

“There is a reason for trying to hide it, not just a cultural reason,” said Sharon Zagagi-Pinhas, former chief military prosecutor for the Israeli army and founder of the Dinah Project, an organization that collects testimonies from survivors of sexual assault on October 7 and in the years since in the hopes of one day prosecuting the perpetrators.

“When you want to present yourself as a freedom fighter, as a resistance fighter, you cannot resort to sexual violence,” she said.

“A Quest for Justice,” a report released by the Dinah Project on July 8, claims that Hamas systematically used sexual violence as a weapon of war during the attack. — claims the group denies. At least some of the sexual violence in captivity appeared to be aimed at humiliation and demoralization, Pinhas said, such as forced nudity, public shaving of hostages’ bodies and pubic hair, and threats of forced marriages.

These are all examples of sex being used as a weapon of war, she said, while warning that justice in such cases is often elusive.

“When you look at arenas around the world, you see that there are many cases of sexual violence used as a weapon of war, but very, very, very few indictments, sanctions or actions,” she said.

Many victims raped during the October 7 attacks have been killed, she said, and a number of former hostages “are unable to speak because they are traumatized.”

But Pinhas said she was frustrated by what she saw as a relatively muted response from the international community, particularly Western feminists and international women’s rights organizations.

“I don’t think the world is paying enough attention to it,” she said. “People don’t want to hear it because they are so caught up in their arguments against Israel. »

For Gilboa-Dalal, justice is a secondary concern: his captivity is finally over, but the long road to recovery – emotional, physical and mental – has only just begun.

“He is with me even now, when I am back home,” he said of his captivity. “It’s with me all the time. It’s not just over there.”