Rom Braslavski Reveals Abuse by Palestinian Islamic Jihad Captors

Rom Braslavski, an Israeli from Pisgat Ze’ev who was kidnapped from the Nova Music Festival on October 7, described in an interview aired Wednesday night on Channel 13 News the brutal treatment he endured in captivity under Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Braslavski said his captors stripped him naked, starved him, and tied him up while assaulting him. “They stripped me of all my clothes, my underwear, everything. They tied me up while I was completely naked. I was torn apart, dying, with no food,” he said. “It was violence meant to humiliate me. The goal was to crush my dignity — and that’s exactly what it did.”

He said the abuse repeated frequently. “It’s difficult to talk about it. It was something even the Nazis didn’t do. During Hitler’s time, they wouldn’t have done things like this,” he said quietly. “You just pray for it to stop. Every day there was another hell. Every beating, every night — I told myself, ‘I survived another day in hell. Tomorrow there will be another. And another. It doesn’t end.’”

At one point, Braslavski said he prayed constantly: “I prayed to God, ‘Please, save me, get me out of this already.’ And you just say to yourself, ‘What the f***?’” He described his captivity as “a meeting with the devil.”

Braslavski was serving as a security guard at the Nova Festival when he was captured after throwing stones at approaching terrorists. His mother, Tami Braslavski, told Channel 13 that her son “was held alone” for most of his captivity and was taken down to the tunnels “two days before his release.”

“His captors demanded that he convert to Islam. He refused. He went through abuse, and I don’t want to elaborate further,” she said. In previous remarks to Israel Hayom, she added that her son “was held alone for two years, and for part of the time he was held with the bodies of other hostages beside him.”

During his time in captivity, Palestinian Islamic Jihad released a video showing Braslavski appearing gaunt and begging for his life. His mother led an international campaign for his release, saying her son was offered food in exchange for conversion but refused. When he was freed last month under a U.S.-brokered ceasefire deal, he was filmed wrapped in an Israeli flag, embracing IDF soldiers.

Braslavski’s testimony joins several others from released hostages who have described severe mistreatment in Gaza. Among them, Amit Sosna and Ilana Gritchovski both spoke publicly about physical and emotional abuse while in captivity. Gritchovski later testified before the UN Security Council, recalling that “on the way to Gaza, when they started touching me and hurting me, I fainted. I couldn’t bear it.” Fifteen-year-old Dafna Elikim, kidnapped from her home in Kibbutz Nahal Oz with her younger sister Ella, also recounted months of harassment. “One terrorist guard kept touching me all the time,” she said. “He told me everyone else would return but I’d stay with him — that we’d be a family, have children. He said he was coming with me into the shower.”

Earlier this year, Israel’s Health Ministry submitted a special report to the International Red Cross documenting the conditions of twelve released hostages. The report concluded that several had suffered ongoing physical and psychological abuse and urged immediate international medical intervention to save remaining hostages.