Freed hostages to lawmakers: ‘At this very moment, someone is being raped in a Gaza tunnel’

Aviva Siegel, who was released from Gaza in November, and her daughter Shir tell Knesset lawmakers that women and men are being raped by terrorists in tunnels under the Strip.

“The terrorists bring inappropriate clothes for the girls, the clothes of dolls. They turned the girls into their dolls, that they can do whatever they want with. And it’s unbelievable that they’re still there,” says Aviva, who was abducted from her home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza along with  her husband Keith. He is still being held hostage in Gaza.

“I can’t breathe, I can’t deal with it, it’s too hard. It’s been nearly four months and they are still there,” she tells the Knesset caucus on victims of sexual and gender violence in the war against Hamas.

“I want to tell you that the boys go through these things too. They can’t get pregnant, but they also go through it. And something must change now,” says Aviva.

“I would like to go back to captivity to protect the girls there, like I did when I was there. I felt like they were my daughters,” she says.

“My heart is there and it’s exploding. I can’t understand how the world is silent.”

Aviva’s daughter, Shir, tells the lawmakers that her mother’s testimony is “only the tip of the iceberg,” and blasts ministers for not being present to hear the accounts.

“They are sitting in captivity, they have not done anything wrong! We have no right to just sit here, we need to scream for them. At this very moment there is someone being raped in a tunnel,” Shir says.

“Where are the really important people? The decision makers who sit in the cabinet and aren’t hearing this?” she says.

Chen Goldstein Almog, who was also held in Gaza, told the lawmakers today that “there are girls there who have not had their period for a long time and maybe that’s what we should be praying for, that it’s the body protecting itself so that, God forbid, they will not be able to get pregnant.”

Testimony from witnesses, first responders, medical personnel and others have pointed to numerous cases of victims being sexually abused during the October 7 onslaught, during which thousands of Hamas terrorists rampaged through southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking 240 hostages into Gaza.