Courageous Amit Soussana, kidnapped from her Kfar Aza home on October 7, described in graphic detail a serious of traumatic and disturbing events of forced sexual violance and physical torture in an interview with The New York Times.

Former hostage Amit Soussana, kidnapped on the deadly October 7 attack by Palestinian Islamist group Hamas and released on the last day of the hostage release, presented her personal testimony of the sexual violence and physical abuse she endured in Hamas captivity in an eight-hour interview with The New York Times published Tuesday.

She is the first released hostage to testify in detail about sexual atrocities committed by Hamas.

She made headlines earlier when a surveillance video showed the moment of her capture, when she fought off seven Hamas terrorists before being taken to Gaza as a captive.

Soussana said she was held in a child’s bedroom in Gaza called Muhammad, would sometimes sit beside her on the bed, lift her shirt, and grope her breasts, she said.

Muhammad was acutely concerned about her menstrual period, she said, inquiring if she was bleeding, if she had washed herself since, and when it would end.

After about two weeks of captivity, Muhammad forced her to commit a sex act on him, Soussana said. On that morning, he unlocked the chain around her ankle so that she could wash herself in the bathtub, she said. After she began, Muhammad returned with a pistol. “He came toward me and shoved the gun at my forehead,” she said.

Muhammad hit her repeatedly to force her to take her towel off. After she did, Muhammad groped her before continuing to hit her. Afterward, he dragged her back to the child’s room at gunpoint. The room was covered in images of SpongeBob Squarepants, she said.

“With the gun pointed at me, [he] forced me to commit a sexual act on him,” Soussana said. After it was over, he left the room. When he returned, she said, he expressed guilt and fear: telling her, “I’m bad. I’m bad. Please don’t tell Israel.”

Soussana then discussed a second captor, Amir, after she was transferred to a different location. On the day that she arrived at the new apartment, the Hamas terrorists wrapped her head in a pink shirt, forced her onto the floor, handcuffed her, and beat her with the butt of a gun, she said.

Then they suspended her “like a chicken on a stick, suspended between two couches.” She recalled that she felt that her hands would be dislocated. Hamas inquisitors tried to extract from her information while beating the soles of her feat.

Reports of acts of sexual violence committed by Hamas have been told in second-hand accounts by women and girls freed in the hostage deal last November, but none have been as explicit as Soussana’s.

Apologists for Hamas have denied any reports of sexual violence committed by Hamas, saying if it took this long to bring the allegations to light, they could not be true.

Many victims of Hamas’s sexual crimes on October 7 are dead or imprisoned. 19 women hostages, alive or dead, remain in Gaza.

A Hamas spokesperson, Basem Naim, cast doubt on Soussana’s claims and demanded that the newspaper investigate them. He said, howver, that such an investigation would be impossible under “the current circumstances.”

Naim questioned why Soussana had not spoken out publicly about the extent of her abuse until now. The level of detail in her account makes it difficult to believe, he said, “unless some security officers designed it.”

Naim denied that Hamas members could carry out such an act because the human body is sacred to them. “For us, the human body, and especially that of the woman, is sacred,” he said, adding that Hamas’s religious beliefs “forbade any mistreatment of any human being, regardless of his sex, religion, or ethnicity.”

The UN Secretary General’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict, Pramila Patten, submitted a report to the UN Security Council that said: “We found clear and convincing information that sexual violence, including rape, sexualized torture, and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, has been committed against hostages, and we have reasonable grounds to believe that such violence may still be ongoing against those in captivity.”

In response to Soussana’s interview, President Isaac Herzog posted on X: “Amit Soussana speaks for all those who cannot speak. She speaks for all the victims of Hamas’s despicable sexual crimes and abuse. She speaks for all women everywhere. The whole world has the moral duty to stand with Amit – and all the victims – in condemning Hamas’s brutal terror and in demanding the immediate return of all the hostages.”