For thirteen bloody centuries, from the 7th to the 20th century, the Arab Islamic slave trade ripped more than 17 million Africans from their homes, marched them across burning deserts and stormy seas, and sold them into a hell that makes the Atlantic trade look like a footnote. This was no mere commerce. This was systematic racial extermination dressed in religious robes. The Arabs didn’t just want labor. They wanted Africans erased: men castrated, women turned into disposable sex slaves, children bred out of existence. And today the woke mob screams about 1619 while deliberately burying this mountain of black corpses under a pile of silence. That silence is complicity. That silence is racist.
The numbers crush every lie the grievance industry peddles. Seventeen million captured. Eighty percent died on the way: thirst, exhaustion, disease, or a casual bullet to the head when they slowed the caravan. Of the survivors, almost every single male was castrated. No anesthesia. Hot iron or crude knife. Infection finished what the blade started. The survival rate was maybe one in ten. That means for every eunuch who reached the markets of Baghdad, Cairo, or Zanzibar, nine boys bled to death in the sand. The Arabs perfected genocide through mutilation. They didn’t want a black population reproducing in their lands. They wanted black blood extinguished.
The women fared no better. They were raped on arrival, raped every night, raped until they broke. Concubines for the harems, field slaves, domestic animals. Their children, if the master acknowledged them at all, were born into slavery and usually sold off the moment they could walk. This wasn’t incidental cruelty. This was policy. Islamic texts and legal rulings spelled it out: the slave owner owns every inch of the slave’s body, every minute of her life, every child she carries. The Arab world built its wealth and its pleasure palaces on black wombs and black backs.
And the trade was massive, relentless, state-sponsored. Caliphs, sultans, and emirs ran it like a national industry. The Swahili coast, the Red Sea ports, the Sahara routes: all arteries pumping African flesh into the Islamic heartland. Zanzibar’s slave market was a slaughterhouse where human beings were inspected like cattle, teeth checked, genitals examined, price set by how many rapes the girl could endure or how long the castrated boy would live. Tippu, the most famous slaver, was a devout Muslim hero to his people and a sadistic warlord who depopulated entire regions of Congo for ivory and slaves. His caravans left trails of bones across Central Africa.
Thirteen centuries. Not four hundred years. Not a “mistake” by a few bad apples. This was the beating heart of Islamic empire from Medina to Morocco, from the Umayyads to the Ottomans. The same Ottoman Empire that leftist professors love to romanticize as “tolerant” was still castrating African boys and stocking its harems with African girls right up to the 20th century. The Crimean Khanate, Muslim vassals of the Ottomans, raided Ukraine and Russia for white slaves, sure, but the real money, the real volume, the real horror was always black Africa.
Yet walk onto any American campus today and try mentioning this. Watch the eyes glaze over. Watch the mob rush to change the subject back to Thomas Jefferson’s sins. The same people who claim to speak for black lives will spit in your face if you bring up the longest, deadliest, most sadistic slave trade in human history, because the perpetrators were not white Christians. That’s the only sin that matters to them. White Christian sin. Every other genocide, every other atrocity gets a shrug as long as the killers prayed to Allah five times a day.
That is racist. Full stop. Treating black suffering as valuable only when a white man causes it is the most condescending, paternalistic, anti-black attitude imaginable. It says black lives matter only as a stick to beat white people with. The millions of Africans who were castrated, raped, and worked to death by Arab masters apparently don’t count. Their blood is cheap because it doesn’t serve the narrative.
The woke cult doesn’t ignore the Arab slave trade because it’s obscure. They ignore it because it explodes their entire worldview. It proves that evil is not the exclusive property of Europeans. It proves that slavery was not invented in Virginia. It proves that Islamic civilization, the one they keep insisting is a paragon of tolerance and science, spent thirteen centuries committing racial annihilation on a scale that dwarfs anything the West ever did.
Until we drag this genocide into the light, scream its name from every rooftop, and force the cowards to look at the mountain of skulls they’ve spent decades hiding, there can be no honest conversation about slavery, about racism, or about who owes whom reparation. The debt is not just to the descendants of the Atlantic trade. The debt is to the forgotten millions whose names were never recorded, whose bodies were thrown into unmarked graves across three continents, whose blood cries out for justice the woke mob refuses to hear.
Seventeen million. Castrated. Raped. Erased.
Say their names. Or shut up forever about slavery.
“Every living creature loves itself, and as soon as it is born strives to preserve itself.” — Cicero
Cicero, fortunately for himself, was not familiar with the concept of Identity Politics, Critical Race Theory, Institutional Racism, Intersectionality, or “White Privilege/ Male Privilege”; otherwise he would certainly have changed his mind. He did not yet know that a new race of people would appear that would not strive to preserve itself, but to voluntarily sacrifice itself in the name of the universal progress, personified in Muslim migrants, BLM and, of course, “Free Palestine.”
In Israel, this race has multiplied in an extraordinary way, and even Oct. 7 could not change its nature. Recently, two Israeli women decided to defend Arabs in Mukhmas, east of Ramallah, from “noar ha’gvaot” (“Hilltop Youth”). The stones of Jewish settlers injured them, and they were evacuated to an Israeli hospital.
Let’s think about it: two young women put themselves in huge danger TWICE. First, they traveled to an Arab village, where they could at very least easily have become the target of sexual aggression from those they were there to protect; second, they got involved in a direct conflict between groups of armed men.
This anomaly, a challenge to the basic instinct of self-preservation, is, of course, not just an Israeli phenomenon. Masochism has become the norm in Western civilization.
The story of Robert Fisk from The Independent provides a textbook example. In Pakistan, Afghan refugees severely beat him. His reaction was forgiveness and understanding. He pointed out that their “brutality was entirely the product of others, of us, of we who had armed their struggle against the Russians and ignored their pain and laughed at their civil war and then armed and paid them again for the ‘War for Civilization’ just a few miles away and then bombed their homes and ripped up their families and called them ‘collateral damage.’”
In 2008, an Italian activist and co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), Vittorio Arrigoni, 36, arrived in Gaza on a boat which broke Israel’s blockade to help “Palestinian people.” He had the Arabic word for “resistance” (مقاومة, muqāwama) tattooed on his right arm. Salafist jihadis seized and executed him.
After mass gang rapes in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, Mayor Henriette Reker urged young women and girls to remain at “an arm’s length” from strangers, that is, apparently wear closed clothing (possibly burkas?). Not long before this, Recker herself was stabbed and seriously wounded whilst campaigning to become mayor.
In December 2015, a gay person took pity on two young refugees in a park, inviting them to his home and offering food and clothing. This was the very last good deed in his life. Moroccans (aged 16 and 19), raped their benefactor, beat him to death and then dressed him in women’s clothes and strangled him with a dead snake, which they found in the park. (It is difficult to find a more symbolic story of the end of Western civilization than this one).
In early April 2016, a Norwegian politician, Karsten Nordal Hauken, who helped immigrants from the Third World, invited a refugee from Somalia to his home. After getting food and shelter, the asylum seeker decided that all this was not enough for him; he raped Karsten Nordal Hauken. For Karsten, this was a “serious trauma”: he fell into depression, became addicted to alcohol and drugs, and needed to see a psychologist. His rapist was arrested and sent to prison (which, given the state of prisons in Norway, resembled a five-star hotel for him). Five years later, after a lengthy trial, the Norwegian authorities decided to extradite the migrant to his homeland. For the long-suffering Hauken, this decision was another trauma. In an interview with the Norwegian TV channel NRK, he said that he felt pain and bitterness. “I had a strong feeling of guilt and responsibility. I was the reason that he would not be in Norway anymore, but rather, sent to a dark uncertain future in Somalia.” He also added that “I see him mostly as a product of an unfair world, a product of an upbringing marked by war and despair.”
In August 2018, a group of American cyclists travelled to Tajikistan. They wanted to prove to themselves and the whole world that evil does not exist, that all people are good, and the stories about Muslim terrorists are only a scarecrow for stupid children. They were riding bicycles when a car crashed into them at full speed. Later, people shouting “Allahu akbar” murdered those who had survived the crash.
In December 2018, jihadis in Burkina Faso captured 37-year-old Canadian Edith Blais and her Italian companion Luca Tacchetto while they were touring the region. They were held in the desert in northern Mali for 15 months before fleeing one night on foot. But …she justified her abductors. “They don’t have anything, they’re very poor and they don’t understand they’re doing wrong,” she said.
In February 2020, migrants subjected an 18-year-old Swedish teen to heinous bullying. Among other things, they urinated on his face and forced him to open his mouth while doing so. But according to Mikael Damberg, Sweden’s Social Democratic Minister of the Interior, the young migrants did so “because they feel hopeless and like they do not belong in society.”
After the massacre in Würzburg in June 2021, in which a Somali man who was screaming “Allahu akbar” murdered three women in a shop and seriously injured five others, including an eleven-year-old girl, Würzburg’s mayor Christian Schuchardt (Christian Social Union, CSU) said that “the Somali community is now deeply insecure.” “How would you feel as a foreigner in our city?,” he asked.
On December 31, 2024, Imogen, a 19-old Briton, became victim of the mass sexual assault attack at Piazza del Duomo, Milan, when she brought in the new year with friends. According to the Italian news agency ANSA, the men were identified as young North Africans. Eyewitnesses reported that they were carrying Palestinian flags. Imogen didn’t let them be disparaged. “It is a total, blatant lie, to claim that our group were attacked by men holding Palestinian flags,” Imogen insisted.
In October 2025, a Malian migrant raped Izaro, a young woman from Bilbao (Spain). After she shared her story publicly, the conservative party Vox wrote on X: “This is how these scoundrels operate.… We urgently need to close borders, even more so to eradicate this irrational do-gooderism. A firm hand, or the system will never work.” Rather than directing her criticism toward the left’s facilitating the mass arrival of criminals, Izaro took aim at the Vox party, and blamed it for spreading “racist junk propaganda.”
This is not an exception to the rule; it is already the norm. Many on social media are sarcastically asking whether countless “woke” people who stand for a “Free Palestine” know what would await them if they found themselves in Gaza. I’m convinced they do. They know, and they’re ready to sacrifice themselves. Because this is a new quasi-religion that demands voluntary human sacrifices in the name of “universal progress and justice.”
The social experiment was a success. Mice save cats; hares defend foxes; sheep help wolves. Cicero would certainly have been quite astonished to encounter such a phenomenon.
Our Novichok nightmare: Former Russian spy and his daughter targeted by Putin in Salisbury poisonings relive hell of hallucinations 'like LSD' that left them close to death
A former Russian spy and his daughter targeted by Vladimir Putin in a chemical attack on the streets of Britain have revealed the terrifying details of their ordeal for the first time.
Sergei Skripal, a double agent who had passed intelligence to MI6, and his then 33-year-old daughter Yulia nearly lost their lives in the attack by Russian assassins in Salisbury on March 4, 2018.
The Skripals, who were poisoned after the deadly nerve agent Novichok was sprayed on the doorknob of Mr Skripal's home, spent three weeks in comas and endured a long and painful recovery. They have been in hiding ever since.
The doorknob of Mr Skripal's home, where the Novichok was smeared on
Now, their account of the Salisbury Poisoning, as it became known, has been revealed in statements issued to the official inquiry into the poisonings.
They reveal their symptoms began as they were eating lunch at the Italian restaurant chain Zizzi in Salisbury.
Ms Skripal, who had flown into Britain from Russia the previous day, recounts how the pair initially found it 'funny' when their eyes began to twitch.
But their symptoms rapidly worsened and led to increasing breathlessness, vivid hallucinations and vomiting.
Ms Skripal says that, as the deadly poison took hold after leaving the restaurant, 'everything in the street was swinging around, really, really bad' and that she had to 'hold hands with my dad'.
Sergei Skripal with his daughter. Yulia's symptoms began as they were eating lunch at the Italian restaurant chain Zizzi in Salisbury
Yulia Skripal speaks to a journalist on May 23, 2018 in London
After walking for a few minutes towards the Sainsbury's car park where Mr Skripal had parked his red BMW, they had to take a break.
Ms Skripal says: 'We sat on the bench to catch some breath. When I sat down it was a very strange and scary feeling almost everything was blurred and colours were changing….you see it's pink, red, blue, so it's like being on LSD or amphetamines.'
She says she fell unconscious within seconds. She believes she could have choked on her own vomit had she not been helped by members of the public, who dialled 999.
In his statement, Mr Skripal said: 'I remember hallucinating and seeing Arabic men and women. I tried to punch one of them. I knew it was a hallucination because there are not a lot of Arabic people in Salisbury.'
CCTV cameras showed Ms Skripal leaning on her father's shoulder. She did not appear to be moving 'other than making circle motions with her left hand'.
Mr Skripal, 74, recalls the moment he woke from his coma: 'When I stopped dreaming I thought it had been one day, but really it had been 21 days.'
The incident sparked a huge investigation by counter-terror police, which involved 180 military experts in chemical warfare defence and decontamination.
The Dawn Sturgess inquiry, which is being led by Justice Lord Hughes of Ombersley, is named after the 44-year-old who was the only person who died as a result of the poisonings.
The mother-of-three inadvertently sprayed herself with Novichok after her boyfriend found the discarded nerve agent in a perfume bottle. She died three weeks later.
Suspicion focused on Russia when testing on what appeared to be a 'military grade nerve agent' revealed it had been developed by the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
Novichok is a nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union and Russia between 1971 and 1993.
Scientists claim is the deadliest nerve agent ever made.
Investigators in protective gear are seen in England in 2018 following the Salisbury poisonings
Police believe the poison was administered by two men who flew into Britain a day before Ms Skripal under the fake names of Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov (pictured)
Lord Hughes ordered that the Skripals should not give evidence in person or remotely in case it gave away their location. The inquiry will deliver its verdict next month.
Mr Skripal a former colonel in Russian spy agency GRU, was arrested in Russia in 2004 and was serving a 15-year jail term for passing information to MI6 during the 1990s and 2000s when he was released in 2010 during a spy swap. But the Kremlin's position is that double agents will ultimately 'meet their fate'.
Police believe the poison was administered by two men who flew into Britain a day before Ms Skripal under the fake names of Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov. That July, the spies were identified by the Foreign Office as Ivan Yermakov and Aleksey Lukashev.
They sparked ridicule after claiming they were in Salisbury to see the 'famous 123m spire' of the city's cathedral.
The British Government also accuses the pair of hacking Ms Skripal's emails since 2013, using a malware called X-Agent. The men are also on the FBI's most-wanted list for their alleged role in interfering in the US presidential elections in 2016.
DS Nick Bailey fought back the tears as he recalled nearly dying after arriving on the scene of the infamous Salisbury poisonings
He was sick within hours of attending the home of victims Sergei and Yulia Skripal and suffered a horrendous night's sleep.
He recalled: 'They were like nightmares or hallucinations, like pure heat and flames like light in front of my eyes, if you were able to get close enough to the surface of the sun.
'It's like a tsunami or pure heat and fire. It was terrifying.'
He took himself to A and E where a consultant told him he had been poisoned with a nerve agent.
Mr Bailey spent a fortnight critically ill in hospital.
Novichok victim Charlie Rowley (pictured) was making noises 'like a cow' and acting 'grossly abnormal' after he was poisoned by the Russian nerve agent, an inquiry heard
Novichok victim Charlie Rowley was making noises 'like a cow' and acting 'grossly abnormal' after he was poisoned by the Russian nerve agent, an inquiry heard.
Mr Rowley and his partner Dawn Sturgess were unknowingly exposed to the chemical agent, which was hidden inside a perfume bottle in Amesbury, Wiltshire.
Paramedic Ben Channon told the inquiry on Friday he was sent to 'a gentleman that was reported as behaving strangely and hallucinating'.
Mr Channon said he found Mr Rowley 'up against a wall' with his hands 'almost as if he was climbing down the wall' and 'making noises very much like a cow and making mooing noises essentially'.
The paramedic also noticed 'profuse amounts of saliva coming from his mouth'.
He added that he remembered he and his ambulance colleague 'looking at each other and being very concerned that this behaviour was grossly abnormal in comparison to anything that we perhaps encountered before'.
Dawn Sturgess, 44, died after she was exposed to the Russian nerve agent Novichok, which was left in a discarded perfume bottle in Amesbury, Wiltshire
She died after spraying it on her wrist.
Rowley told the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry of his horror at finding her 'convulsing and foaming at the mouth' at their home in Amesbury, Wiltshire.
He said that she had described feeling 'very, very strange' and went to lie in the bath before falling ill.
He then went into the bathroom and found her in a desperate state, prompting him to call 999 in a panic, even forgetting where he lived.
Dawn began feeling unwell about 10 to 15 minutes after she sprayed the perfume on her wrist.
She said that she felt 'very, very strange' and that she had to go and lie in the bath, which I thought was a bit strange.
'After a minute I went into the bathroom to see what she was doing and I found her lying in the bath with her clothes on, just lying in the bath, convulsing and foaming at the mouth and I panicked, I didn't know what to do.
'Thoughts were running through my head and I didn't know what to do, I was thinking 'what do I do, what do I do'. The only thing I could think was to call 999, I did that and had a complete memory blank.'
Mr Rowley said he forgot where he lived and ran around his flat looking for some paperwork with his address on.
'I would like to clarify that I'd taken Dawn out of the bath before I called 999. The bath had not contained any water, Dawn was wearing jeans and a T-shirt.'
Police investigating Queen Elizabeth Gardens in Salisbury, where Dawn Sturgess had been before she fell ill after coming into contact with Novichok,
Wrong drug given
Paramedic Karl Bullpitt, who attended to Mr Skripal at the scene, described in writing how he had initially picked up naloxone - a drug used to treat opioid overdose - intending to administer it to the former spy.
However Mr Skripal vomited before he could give him the drug, and in a rush to clear his airways the paramedic knocked over the drugs bag inside the ambulance.
Once he had finished clearing his airway he picked up the vials he believed to be naloxone and administered it with a "good effect" Mr Bullpitt said, with Mr Skripal becoming "slightly more responsive".
This impact, he added, "bolstered" suspicions Mr Skripal had suffered an overdose.
But when Mr Bullpitt returned to the ambulance station later that day and went to restock the drugs bag, he realised there was no naloxone missing - meaning he must have administered a different drug.
He realised then he had instead given Mr Skripal atropine, which is carried to treat the symptoms of a low heart rate.
'Excellent' error
Discussing this in his evidence, FT49 said: "The inadvertent administration of atropine, yes, that was an excellent drug dosing error to make, and that was again clinically beneficial in maintaining Sergei’s heart rate.
New accounts of sex assaults on men, women and girls expose even greater depths of Hamas’s depravity
Dressed up in dolls clothes, a male victim's harrowing account of sexual assault, and new revelations that a young girl was forced to perform a sex act on her Hamas captor in a shower highlight the increasing testimonies emerging from hostages raped in Gaza.
I have covered this conflict for the Daily Mail from the very first day, on the ground since October 7. That whole time, hostages were being held entirely at the mercy of their Gazan captors, some in isolation in dark tunnels.
And just when it seems Hamas's savagery has reached its limit, new accounts expose even greater depths of depravity.
Two years ago, when terrorists stormed the Israeli border, dragging peace-loving kibbutzniks from their beds and attacking young revellers at the Nova music festival, testimonies of sexual violence and torture began to emerge.
These accounts were presented to the United Nations, which documented multiple cases of abuse.
I have spoken to traumatised survivors of Nova who told me that while they were in hiding in bushes or playing dead, they heard women being raped.
One account submitted by the Association of Rape Crisis Centres in Israel described a woman being gang-raped, her breasts cut off with a box cutter as the terrorists took turns with her.
'They threw her breast on the floor', said a witness, who added that afterwards they played with it 'like a toy'.
Natalia Lisbona (pictured, in Gaza) has covered this conflict for the Daily Mail from the very first day, on the ground since October 7
Rom Braslavski, 21, was taken from the Nova music festival on October 7 while working as a security guard
At the same festival, one young man bravely told me he was gang-raped by several terrorists.
I was among a small group of journalists shown censored footage and photographs from the aftermath of the massacre at Israel's intelligence headquarters.
The images were ghastly - women had objects violently inserted into their groin area, it was impossible to tell what they were. A bullet? A nail? But the photos made me retch.
Among the pictures was the image of a woman in what was left of a black dress — her lifeless body twisted, her dignity stripped away, as she was exposed fully, a huge gash on her thigh. It is an image I will never forget.
Many of the women brutalised that day will never be able to testify — because they did not survive.
Two years later, Israel's wounds are still raw, open and, at times, festering.
On Wednesday, Aviva Siegal 62, who was kidnapped by Hamas on Oct 7 along with her husband, Keith 65, from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, spoke before the UN Committee Against Torture (UNCAT) in Geneva.
She recounted acts of sexual assault committed by Hamas, including a 16-year-old female hostage: 'I am witness to one of the girls who was with us, that the Hamas terrorist came to the bathroom, told her to get undressed, came into the shower with her, and forced her to do oral sex. And she had to smile after she did that too.
Pictured: An armed Palestinian militant leading a man away during the Supernova music festival
Aviva Siegal, seen here with her daughter Elan, also said the male hostages were also victims
'I am a witness of one of the girls who was forced to take a shower. She is 16 years old, she's never ever shown anybody her body, the Hamas terrorist just stood there and stared and smiled.
'One of the days, one of the girls went to the bathroom, and when she came back, she was shaking. She's young… and after a while she told us a Hamas terrorist touched her whole body and did whatever he wanted. She was so scared because he said to her that if she said anything about it, he would kill her.'
Back in January 2024, Siegal testified that some of the female hostages were dressed up for their captor's depraved enjoyment.
'The terrorists bring inappropriate clothes, clothes for dolls and turn the girls into their dolls. Dolls on a string with which you can do whatever you want, whenever you want.'
Siegal, who was released in the first ceasefire deal after 51 days while her husband remained captive for 484 days, also said the male hostages were also victims.
'And it must be said that the boys also go through what the girls go through. They don't get pregnant, but they are also a puppet on a string', she told Israel's parliament.
Keith testified at the same hearing on Wednesday that he was forced to undress in front of his captives as they shaved his body: 'Our captives compared my body parts to those of another hostage, threatened us with knives, leaving us to beg to go to the bathroom.'
Dr Itai Pessach, who treated one-quarter of all hostages on their return at Sheba medical centre in Tel Aviv, would not discuss specific cases for fear of inadvertently identifying victims, but he emphasised the scale of sexual violence.
Amit Soussana was kicked and punched by Hamas gunmen as they abducted her on October 7
Amit Soussana revealed that she was sexually assaulted by a guard while she was held captive in Gaza by Hamas. She was kidnapped from her home in Kfar Aza, Israel during the October 7 raid. Ms Soussana is pictured outside the ruins of her home
'Almost fifty percent of them had endured significant sexual assaults,' he said.
'And how do you define it? Being watched naked while bathing and forced to dress in front of a few men ? To me, that also counts as assault. Therefore, the figure could be far higher', he told the Daily Mail.
Last week, the Daily Mail broke the world exclusive that Rom Braslavsky, 21, described sexual violence during his two years in captivity, where he was tortured, stripped naked and abused.
'It is sexual violence, and its main purpose was to humiliate me. The goal was to crush my dignity and that's exactly what he did,' Braslavsky told Channel 13's Hazinor programme. 'It's hard for me to talk about that part, specifically. I don't like to talk about it.'
It was the first time a male hostage had publicly gone on record. He also described other methods of torture such as stones forced in his ear and daily beatings while his captors were laughing.
Amit Sousanna, 40 was the first former hostage to speak publicly. She told how she was dragged from her home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza by ten men and then subjected to sexual acts at gunpoint in captivity.
Ilana Gritzewsky, 30, who was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz, recounted that she lost consciousness during the kidnapping after being sexually assaulted.
When she came to in Gaza, she found herself half-naked and surrounded by seven men, who were frustrated when they realised she was on her period.
Fifteen-year-old Dafna Elkayim testified in May that her captor threatened to join her in the shower, said he would marry her and touched her inappropriately.
She was abducted alongside her eight-year-old sister, Ela, after their father and stepmother were murdered.
Noa Beer was driving away from the Nova festival site when she and the group she was with came up against a Hamas roadblock
One of the passengers is seen with blood streaming down his face in the chilling footage
Ilana Gritzewsky (pictured), who was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz, recounted that she lost consciousness during the kidnapping after being sexually assaulted
Released hostage Ilana Gritzewsky poses for a portrait in her apartment in Kiryat Gat, Israel, on Sunday, Dec. 15, 2024, near photos of her boyfriend, Matan Zangauker, who was held hostage by Hamas in the Gaza Strip
Dafna Elyakim (pictured, right) and Ela Elyakim (pictured, left) were reunited with their mother Maayan Zin (pictured, centre)
A report submitted by Israel's Ministry of Health last year said Hamas captors forced two minors to perform sexual acts on one another, compelled them to undress in front of them, touched their private parts, and whipped their genitalia.
The same two former hostages reported being bound and beaten throughout their captivity, with scars and marks consistent with trauma.
Experts warn there are likely many more cases of sexual assault and rape among the released hostages that remain unreported, as survivors often stay silent due to shame and stigma.
Specialists in trauma care stress that victims need time, safety and psychological support before they can begin to speak about what happened to them — if they ever choose to at all.
'There is also the fact that many of the hostages endured such horrific experiences, that they would have blocked a lot of it out.' Says Dr Pessach.
After everything these men and women have endured over the past two years, there's at least some consolation in knowing that - should they choose - it's possible for them to talk about it, receive real help and begin to rebuild.
But my thoughts keep returning to the Palestinians who have spent the last 19 years living under Hamas's rule of terror and all the stories of abuse they will never be able to share.
An Israeli man freed from captivity in Gaza has revealed for the first time how he was sexually assaulted and tortured by his kidnappers in an interview with Israel's Channel 13 programme Hazinor.
Rom Braslavski, 21, was violently abducted by Palestinian Islamic Jihad on October 7, 2023 while he was working as a security guard at the Nova music festival.
He was held captive for more than two years in brutal conditions and was released last month as part of a US-brokered ceasefire deal that saw all living hostages freed.
In a televised interview, Mr Braslavski speaks of his horrific ordeal for the first time and detailed how his captors stripped him naked, tied him up and made him starve.
'They stripped me of all my clothes — underwear, everything. They tied me up from my... while I was completely naked. I was torn apart, dying, with no food,' he said.
'I prayed to God, "Please, save me, get me out of this already." And you just say to yourself, "What the f***?"'
Mr Braslavski's testimony marks a harrowing new chapter in the accounts emerging from freed hostages, exposing the scale of the abuse inflicted by Palestinian terrorists.
'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.'
When asked by Channel 13 reporter Roni Aviram if more assaults took place, Mr Braslavski confirmed they had.
Rom Braslavski, 21, was taken from the Nova music festival on October 7 while working as a security guard
In an upcoming interview with Israel's Channel 13, he details how he was starved and sexually abused by his captors
'Yes. It's hard for me to talk about that part specifically. I don't like to talk about it. It's hard, It was the most horrific thing,' he said.
'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.'
'I came back from meeting the devil,' he added.
While female hostages such as Amit Soussana and Ilana Gritzewsky have bravely spoken of sexual assault in captivity, Mr Braslavski's testimony is the first by a male survivor to publicly describe such abuse.
Ms Gritzewsky, who testified before the UN Security Council, described being held at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.
She said: 'On the way to Gaza, when they started to touch me and sexually abuse me, I passed out physically and mentally. I couldn't handle it anymore.'
In May, 15-year-old Dafna Elyakim spoke publicly about the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of one of her Hamas captors during her time in Gaza.
She had been abducted from her father's home in Kibbutz Nahal Oz along with her younger sister, Ela, then aged eight.
'We had one guard, one of the terrorists, who would touch me all the time, or tell me that I was going to stay there — that they would return Ela and everyone else — and only I would stay behind with him. He said we were going to have children together and a house and all that,' she said. 'He would always tell me that he was coming with me to shower.'
Mr Braslavski broke down in his first TV interview following his release from captivity in Gaza
Last August, Mr Braslavski family authorised the release of parts of a video distributed by Islamic Jihad, showing him emaciated, tortured, unable to stand and pleading for his life.
His mother, Tami, who campaigned tirelessly across the world for his release, said her son was tempted with food to convert to Islam but refused, holding on to his Jewish identity.
Last month, Mr Braslavski was pictured draped in the Israeli flag as he greeted members of the IDF upon his release.
On festival security duty, he was abducted when trying to save an injured person.
In August this year, a video showed him crying, saying he had run out of food and water, unable to stand.
Mr Braslavski's full interview will air on Israel's Channel 13 on Thursday night.
The war began with Hamas' October 7, 2023, attack, when militants killed 1,200 people and took 251 captives.
Mr Braslavski was freed last month amid a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. He is pictured here draped in the Israeli flag as he greeted members of the IDF following his release on October 13
He was working as security at the festival before he was captured. Pictured: Braslavski before he was taken hostage into Gaza
Though most of the 251 who were kidnapped and taken into Gaza have been returned, dead or alive, the last 20 living hostages were only handed back to Israel last month, following the signing of a Gaza peace deal.
Several hostages released by Hamas have revealed they were threatened with weapons and starved to near-death during their time in the tunnels.
Many reported that their cruel Hamas captors ate in front of them as they withered away from hunger.
In one of the worst cases, hostage Avinatan Or, 32, was held in near-total isolation for two years, not meeting another kidnapped person until he was released on Monday.
Avinatan, who was kidnapped alongside his girlfriend Noa Argamani, 28, from the Nova Festival, was also severely starved. Local media reported that he had lost up to 40 per cent of his body weight.
Similarly, hostage Elkana Bohbot, 36, is reported to have spent most of the two years he was held by Hamas chained up in a dark and dingy tunnel where he lost all sense of time.
Kidnapped twins Gali and Ziv Berman, both 28, were separated and cut off from the rest of the world by Hamas.
Though they were held in the same area, neither knew for certain whether the other was alive. Both went through periods of starvation.
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