Former hostage Rom Braslavski said that he was sexually assaulted by his captors while in captivity in Gaza, and was stripped of his clothes, bound, and intentionally starved.
In an interview with Channel 13’s “HaTzinor,” Barvlavski said his captors sought to humiliate him, saying, “He wanted to humiliate me, to trample on my dignity… They did other things like that to me; it’s hard for me to talk about it. I don’t like to talk about him.” Braslavski added, “It’s something even the Nazis didn’t do.”
“They stripped me of all my clothes, my underwear, everything. They tied me up while I wasn’t wearing anything,” he recalled. “And I was torn, dead, without food, praying to god – save me, get me out of this already. And you say, What the hell, what’s wrong here? You just pray to god that it will stop. And when I was there, all day… every beating, all day, you say – I finished another day in hell. Tomorrow morning, I will wake up to more hell and more hell, and it will never end.”
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Protester holds a cutout of Rom Braslavski (C), next to a cutout of the deceased hostage Tamir (L) Nimrodi during a protest in Tel Aviv two months ago. Credit: Tomer Applebaum
Protester holds a cutout of Rom Braslavski (C), next to a cutout of the deceased hostage Tamir (L) Nimrodi during a protest in Tel Aviv two months ago. Credit: Tomer Applebaum
Braslavski, 21, shared that his captors tried to convert him to Islam. “Listen, if you convert to Islam, I will bring you a lot of food, you will live with us,” one of his captors said to him. Braslavski said that it was clear to him how he would respond: “I said to him no, I was born a Jew, I’ll die a Jew.”
A resident of Jerusalem, Braslavski was on leave from his service in the Israeli army when he attended the Nova music festival on October 7 to work as a security guard.
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After helping partygoers escape for hours after the attack, he was kidnapped and taken to Gaza, where he was held by Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
A video released in August 2025 shows Braslavki looking emaciated. In the video, Braslavski says he is unable to stand or walk, and that food and water have run out. “I can’t breathe, I can’t live,” he said.