Israeli Hostage Describes Sexual Assault and Torture During Her Time in Gaza

Amit Soussana was kidnapped from her home in Kfar Aza by Hamas militants on October 7. She was pulled from her burning home and then dragged back to Gaza. This part of her ordeal was captured on camera, showing that she fought her captors.

Amit would wind up spending several weeks in captivity. The first couple of weeks were spent mostly alone in an apartment with a man named Muhammad.

Ms. Soussana said she was held alone in a child’s bedroom, chained by her left ankle. Sometimes, the guard would enter, sit beside her on the bed, lift her shirt and touch her, she said.

He also repeatedly asked when her period was due. When her period ended, around Oct. 18, she tried to put him off by pretending that she was bleeding for nearly a week, she recalled.

Around Oct. 24, the guard, who called himself Muhammad, attacked her, she said.

Early that morning, she said, Muhammad unlocked her chain and left her in the bathroom. After she undressed and began washing herself in the bathtub, Muhammad returned and stood in the doorway, holding a pistol.

“He came towards me and shoved the gun at my forehead,” Ms. Soussana recalled during eight hours of interviews with The New York Times in mid-March. After hitting Ms. Soussana and forcing her to remove her towel, Muhammad groped her, sat her on the edge of the bathtub and hit her again, she said.

He dragged her at gunpoint back to the child’s bedroom, a room covered in images of the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants, she recalled.

“Then he, with the gun pointed at me, forced me to commit a sexual act on him,” Ms. Soussana said.

The Times report doesn’t offer any more detail about the assult but says that Soussana offered a lot more detail during the 8 hours the paper interviewed her. After it was over, her captor apologized and begged her not to tell Israel about what he had done.

As for her credibility, the Times has verified that she told the same story with the same basic details to doctors and a social worker within hours of her release from captivity.

Ms. Soussana’s personal account of her experience in captivity is consistent with what she told two doctors and a social worker less than 24 hours after she was freed on Nov. 30. Their reports about her account state the nature of the sexual act; The Times agreed not to disclose the specifics.

Eventually she was transferred to another house that contained several other Israeli hostages. While she was with them, she was tied up and beaten, supposedly her captors wanted information.

On that day, the guards wrapped her head in a pink shirt, forced her to sit on the floor, handcuffed her, and began beating her with the butt of a gun, she said.

After several minutes, they used duct tape to cover her mouth and nose, tied her feet, and placed the handcuffs on the base of her palms, she said. Then she was suspended, hanging “like a chicken” from a stick stretching between two couches, causing her such pain that she felt that her hands would soon be dislocated.

They carried on beating and kicking her, focusing on the soles of her feet, while simultaneously demanding information they believed she was hiding from them, Ms. Soussana said.

She still doesn’t understand what exactly they wanted or why they thought she was concealing something, she said. At one point, the head guard brought over a spike, and made as if to poke her eye with it, pulling away just in time, she said.

“It was like that for 45 minutes or so,” she said. “They were hitting me and laughing and kicking me, and called the other hostages to see me,” she said.

After the beating, they told her she had 40 minutes to give them the information or she would be killed. One of the other hostages asked if she had any final messages to relay to her family. But she wasn’t killed. Instead she was transferred to another house which contained a stairway leading to underground tunnels. She was kept there for a time and said it was hard to breathe because there was so little oxygen. 

Finally, on November 30, the last day of the truce, she was released. Here’s video showing the moment she was handed over to the Red Cross. The other woman in the car with her was hostage Mia Schem. Schem says she only escaped being raped by her captor because his wife and family were living in the next room.

Soussana is the first hostage to come forward saying she was sexually assaulted while in captivity.