Trigger warning: This article discusses sensitive topics such as sexual assault.
Rom Braslavski was sexually abused in captivity by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hazinor on Channel 13 reported on Wednesday.
In a clip from an interview set to air Thursday night, the released hostage revealed that his captors stripped him naked, starved him, and tied him up while sexually 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."
"It was sexual violence, and its main purpose was to humiliate me," he said. "The goal was to crush my dignity. And that's exactly what he did."
Released hostage Rom Braslavski says he 'met with the devil'
“I prayed to God, ‘Please, save me, get me out of this already.’ And you just say to yourself, ‘What the f***?’”
Braslavski told Hazinor that the abuse happened frequently.
“I don’t like talking about it. It’s difficult. It's something even the Nazis didn't do. During Hitler's time, they wouldn't have done things like this.
"You just pray for it to stop. And while I was there - every day, every beating - I'd say to myself, 'I survived another day in hell. Tomorrow morning, I'll wake up to another hell. And another. And another. It doesn't end.”
Braslavski, of Pisgat Ze'ev, was kidnapped from the Nova Music Festival on October 7. He was working as a security guard at the festival and was fighting off terrorists with stones when he was kidnapped.
Tami Braslavski, his mother, said her son “was held alone” by PIJ and was taken down to the tunnels only “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 told Hazinor.
In a separate report, Israel Hayom quoted Braslavski’s mother saying that Rom “was held alone for two years, and for part of the time he was held with the bodies of other hostages beside him.”