Reply to Hamas’ Systematic Rapes of Israelis to Inflict Maximum Suffering

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[quote=Anonymous]The same guard struck again days later. After a uniquely tough beating, the guard made him and his fellow hostages take showers. But as Gilboa-Dalal walked out, he says, the guard held him back, refused to let him get dressed, threw him onto a sofa and proceeded to sexually assault him.

“I don’t know exactly how much time because my brain kind of disconnected,” Gilboa-Dalal said. “Then he told me again, ‘If you ever tell this to anyone, I’m gonna kill you.’”

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

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

He hopes that his story will empower other victims to speak — survivors who, like him, have struggled to process the lingering feelings of dread, violation and helplessness.

Hostages found ways to cope with the possibility of being assaulted. Amit Soussana 42, for example, said she carried a sanitary pad with her to the bathroom to try and dissuade potential attackers.

“I fooled him to think the period is continuing,” she said in “Screams Before Silence,” a 2024 documentary made by Sheryl Sandberg, former chief operating officer at Facebook. “I did it for about a week until I couldn’t lie anymore.”

Then the guard came into her shower armed.

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

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

“I was injured, I had no power,” she told the documentary show “Uvda.” “All that went through my head was: ‘Romi, everyone in Israel thinks you’re dead, and you’re going to be a sex slave in captivity.’”

In December 2023, she said a senior Hamas official offered to prioritize her in the next hostage release if she would stay 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 Israel Defense Forces, and a founder of the Dinah Project, an organization that gathers testimony from survivors of sexual assault on Oct. 7 and in the years that followed in the hopes of one day prosecuting the perpetrators.

[b]“When you want to present yourself as freedom fighter, as resistance, you can’t use sexual violence,” she said.[/b]

[b]Many victims who were raped during the Oct. 7 attacks were killed, she said, and a number of former hostages “are unable to speak because they’re under trauma.”[/b]

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

“I don’t believe the world is paying adequate attention,” she said. “People don’t want to hear it because they are so consumed in their arguments against Israel.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/world/israel/several-former-hamas-hostages-gaza-share-accounts-sexual-assault-rcna344263[/quote]

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