FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
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NEW: FREED HOSTAGE DETAILS HAMAS’S SEXUAL ASSAULTS OF OTHER HOSTAGES, “EVERY TIME WE TALKED ABOUT IT, AT LEAST ONE OF THE PEOPLE SAID THEY SUFFERED SEXUAL ABUSE”
WASHINGTON – Freed 17-year-old hostage Agam Goldstein-Almog described Hamas’s sexual assaults of other hostages, and detailed a harrowing case of sexual violence suffered by another hostage in Hamas captivity. The new testimony comes from a clip released Tuesday by Israeli media from “Screams Before Silence,” an in-production documentary produced by Sheryl Sandberg.
CLIP TRANSCRIPT
AGAM: “Every time we talked about it, at least one of the people said they had suffered physical and sexual abuse. About half of them, and I haven’t talked to all of the girls who are there. They all talked about their kidnapping. Where she was kidnapped from, what they did to her, what she saw […] That’s when we learned that some of them were being held alone. [The Hamas captors] said that no [girls were] being held alone, only in pairs […] but some of them were alone for the entire time.”
SHERYL: “Can you talk about what they told you?”
AGAM: “I talked to one of them one evening and I asked her how they treated her, what she had been through. She started crying and I cried with her. We were crying together, and then she started telling me. […] She was staying in an apartment with one guard. He told her that they have to move. ‘Go get ready. Go wash yourself at the sink.’”
AGAM: “She went into the bathroom and washed her armpit and that’s when he came into the bathroom and held a gun to her head. He started kissing her and she started crying. […] He took off all of her clothes and touched her all over her body. He asked her to touch his genitals in different ways and he also touched hers. She told me that she couldn’t stop crying and that he wouldn’t stop what he was doing. He enjoyed it.”
AGAM: “For thirty minutes, the gun was pointed at her head. […] She said, ‘I had no other option. He never put his gun away from her head and then he told her, ‘Go get dressed,’ and he left the bathroom.”
AGAM: “They went back to the living room. She told me that her ears were ringing and she couldn’t stop crying. She was in shock. Then they moved her to a different place and she never saw him again. He told her not to tell anyone.”
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