‘I was so sexually violated and tortured that I begged for death,’ Freed Israeli hostage
One of the last batch of freed Israeli hostages, Rom Braslavski, has recounted his two-year ordeal in Gaza after he was abducted by Hamas.
Braslavski told a tale of sheer terror involving unrelenting sexual assault and torture, which led him to beg his captors to allow him to die by starvation.
He was serving as a security guard at the Nova Music Festival in Israel when he was kidnapped on Oct. 7, 2023, by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a Hamas ally.
About 1,200 people were killed in the surprise attack, while hundreds of Israelis were taken hostage.
In captivity, he recalled that he was stripped n@ked, beaten, st@rved and s£xually abused every day for the entire period of his captivity till he was finally released earlier this year.
Braslavski told Israeli media that the purpose of his torture was to humiliate him and crush his dignity. He said they succeeded in doing that.
The freed hostage said the abuse was worse than Nazi torture, and he did not like to think about or discuss it..
He said he would just pray that the torture would stop, and when it finally did, he would tell himself, “You have survived another day in hell. Tomorrow morning, I’ll wake up to another hell. And another. And another. It doesn’t end.”
Braslavsk said it seemed to him like he was in a movie, except that it was real. He expressed the belief that he was tortured simply because he was a jew, and nothing else.
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) had, in August, released chilling footage showing Braslavski emaciated and crying that he could not stand or walk due to pain in his feet.
PIJ had, before then, released another footage of the hostage wherein he looked ill and complained that he was going through “hell” in captivity.
Braslavski was one of the beneficiaries of the Hamas’ cease-fire deal with Israel last month.
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