A terrorist who held Ilana Gritzewsky for 10 days after she was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz told her she would marry him and have his children, the former hostage told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday, weeks after she bravely shared her experience of sexual abuse in captivity at the UN Human Rights Council.
While the former hostage admitted she would have liked to focus on her healing journey after 55 days of captivity – and following the release of her partner Matan Zangauker after 738 days – Gritzewsky said she felt she had a responsibility to share her story given that the opportunity was stolen from so many on October 7, 2023, and in the years that followed the hostage crisis.
“I’m from an area where, on October 7, many people were killed,” she said. “They lost their voices; they were murdered, and they no longer have a voice. There are also more women and men who have experienced sexual assault and don’t have the power or voice to speak about it. So I want to give them strength and show them that if I’m standing here, you can too,” she explained.
“We don’t have to be ashamed of it; it’s not our fault. We didn’t do anything. We can stand with our hands up and say the truth because it’s not our fault. We are victims, and we are survivors, and we are still fighting. And if our soldiers can give everything with their hearts and bodies to protect us, then why can’t I give my fight? When people don’t love us or don’t respect us, I can still bring our voice. I can give us a voice.”
Confronting UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women, ‘silence and denial’
Though Gritzewsky was willing to share her testimony, she made no secret of the fact that it hurt to know she was not believed by many on the international stage whose role is to represent all human rights, including those of Israeli victims of Hamas.
“Why? If you are an organization that is meant to support every people in the world, no matter their religion, the color of their skin, whether they are women or men, you need to protect everyone; we are the same people, with lives, with souls, with a future. So why do you silence or deny things when it concerns Jewish men and women?
“Why, when it concerns us, is it silence, denial, or dismissed as propaganda, or that we are not the good ones? Why do we need to keep proving and proving the truth when there is so much evidence? Why is there always a finger pointed at Jews, and why can’t they believe us?” she said, talking to the Post
In a speech facilitated by UN Watch, Gritzewsky last month confronted UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women Reem Alsalem for choosing to remain in “silence and denial” when she, along with countless other Israelis, were brutalized.
“I am a woman who survived. I am the living proof of sexual violence by Hamas. When other Israeli women and I begged not to be raped, why were you silent?” she asked the official.
Gritzewsky shared that, since her confrontation, discussions have begun with Alsalem’s team to arrange for the official to sit and listen to her testimony in full, a testimony she has now shared with the Post.
Recounting how she was taken on October 7, Gritzewsky described the cruelty of her abductors, saying they took a deliberate satisfaction in causing her pain from the moment she was taken.
She had been enjoying her morning coffee at 6 a.m. on a Saturday when she began hearing the sirens, sirens she initially wrote off as part of the usual attacks launched by Hamas on Israel’s southern citizens. Only when the sirens continued to blare did she realize there was something wrong and retreat to the safe room, where Zangauker was still asleep.
“I ran to our saferoom, which was also our bedroom. I woke my partner and said, ‘There’s a red alert.’ We closed the door and held it shut. A few minutes later, we started hearing gunshots and people shouting in Arabic outside our window. At the same time, messages started coming through on the kibbutz WhatsApp group saying there were terrorists at houses at one end of the kibbutz, then the other. We understood that we were in a very difficult situation. We waited, like Russian roulette. We just waited for our turn to arrive. And eventually, our turn arrived,” she recalled.
Though Zangauker tried to hold the door of the safe room closed, the couple realized, from the sounds of their home being torn apart by terrorists and the sounds of gunshots, that their strategy wouldn’t save them. Wanting to protect himself and his girlfriend, Gritzewsky explained that Zangauker began throwing her perfume bottles and anything he had access to at the terrorists so they could make their escape through an open window.
Once outside the house, the pair ran to the porch of Gadi (73) and Judy Weinstein (70), who were murdered by Hamas and whose bodies were abducted to Gaza, only to find that “there was nowhere to run” and that they were surrounded. It was there that Gritzewsky and Zangauker were separated.
Alone and afraid, Gritzewsky tried to hide under a blanket in a closet but was found within minutes by the invading terrorists as she was saying the Shema prayer. She described how they pulled her out of the space by her hair, and proceeded to bite, kick, and punch her.
“They threw me against a wall. They pointed guns at me. They wanted me to unlock my phone so they could make a video. And the only thing I was thinking was, ‘Where is Matan? And why does my family need to see me like this?’” she said.
Still dizzy and in pain from the attacks, the terrorists dragged Gritzewsky onto the back of a motorcycle and drove her to Gaza. There was no break from the violence, even during the drive to Gaza. The Palestinian terrorists deliberately pressed her leg onto the scorching exhaust, restricted her breathing by placing a nylon bag over her face and continued their beatings. It was also here that the sexual violence began.
As Gritzewsky was overwhelmed by the pain and fear, the terrorists began groping at her body until she eventually passed out. When she awoke in Gaza, after Palestinians placed strong-smelling chemicals under her nose, she found herself half naked and surrounded by seven men.
Hamas terrorists committing sexual abuse, violence against hostages
“I start begging them not to rape me, said that I’m on my period,” she explained. “They continue to kick me, they broke my hip, and they dislocated my jaw.”
Left in agony, the terrorists forced her into a hijab and took her to one of their private homes where she spent the next 10 days being psychologically and sexually abused.
“One [of the terrorists] was hugging me, kissing me, saying that I’m beautiful, that I’m going to marry him, this is my life now, that I’m going to have a child from him,” she said.
The terrorists, aware that the IDF was moving closer to where she was being held, relocated Gritzewsky to another house, one crawling with roaches and without running water. It was here that they began interrogating her about her time in the IDF.
They asked why she served in the military and what she did during her service, and she answered only that it was what she had to do to get her citizenship after making aliyah from Mexico alone at age 16.
“In that house we didn’t have showers, and we were there like for 40 days,” she recalled. “There were days that we had half a liter of water for the day; for two days. I lost 24 pounds (11 kilos) in 55 days. They gave us cucumber with a half of pita; sometimes there was only a small plate of hummus.”
Gritzewsky was one of 168 living hostages – either released in deals by Hamas or rescued by the IDF – out of the 251 people taken on October 7.
Many former hostages, including Amit Soussana, Guy Gilboa-Dalal, and Romi Gonen, have since spoken publicly about experiencing sexual abuse while in Hamas captivity.
Despite the testimonies of survivors and the 2024 findings of the United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Pramila Patten, Alsalem discredited claims of Hamas’s sexual violence in a social media post last year. “No independent investigation found that rape took place on October 7,” she claimed, despite the UN’s own findings based on an extensive review of over 50 hours of footage, 5,000 photographs, and 34 independent interviews.
Gritzewsky commented on Alsalem’s claim: “It is very frustrating that, despite all the evidence of what really happened, we still have to keep speaking out so people won’t deny or refuse to recognize the crimes that were committed. We are people with homes, and they took our lives in just a few minutes. They did whatever they wanted with our lives.”
Thanking UN Watch for facilitating her address to the UNHRC, Gritzewsky shared her gratitude to the people of Israel for the love and compassion they have shown her.
“We feel their love and compassion, and that gives us strength to continue speaking and to continue fighting. We are a beautiful country with beautiful people, and all we want is to live a quiet life, without wars and without insecurity. Thank you for that. At least we are together. We may have differences about some things, but when we need to be together, we are all together,” she concluded.
