Israeli hostage Arbel Yehoud sexually abused ‘almost every day’ in captivity

Arbel Yehoud, an Israeli woman held hostage in Gaza for 482 days after being abducted on 7 October 2023, has revealed she was sexually assaulted “almost every day in captivity” and attempted suicide three times.

Yehoud, now thirty years old, was kidnapped with her boyfriend Ariel Cunio from Nir Oz on 7 October. She was held in unimaginable conditions until 30 January 2025, when the world witnessed her release.

Wide-eyed with fear and surrounded by a baying mob, she was handed over to the Red Cross by Palestinian Islamic Jihad in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis, alongside hostages Gadi Moses, Surasak Lamnau, Sathian Suwannakham, Pongsak Tanna, Bannawat Saethao, and Watchara Sriaoun.

Speaking together for the first time late last week in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12, Yehoud described prolonged physical, psychological and sexual abuse at the hands of her captors in Gaza.

She abandoned her thoughts of suicide after captors showed her video of a protest in Israel where she saw her face on a poster.

“One of the times, not long before my release,” Yehoud said in her interview alongside Cunio, “I saw drone footage from Hostages Square [in Tel Aviv]. I saw people holding signs of people I don’t know, and then suddenly I saw signs of people I knew. I saw a sign for Ariel [Cunio] and a sign for me, signs of people from the kibbutz. From the moment I saw that, I didn’t try to put an end to my own life there.”

She said she was held alone in extended isolation, starved and subjected to repeated mistreatment. Two of her ribs were broken during her captivity.

She admits that the words necessary to describe “what I went through, I went through from beginning to end, almost every day in captivity” remain in a firmly “closed suitcase.”

Yehoud was reunited with her boyfriend, Ariel Cunio, four months ago after his October 2025 release after 738 days in captivity.

She described how they “sat a little to the side and started talking. Then it dawned on both of us that he didn’t know anything about what I went through in captivity.” adding “Even if I understood, I didn’t want to accept it in any way. Then you get punched in the stomach. It feels like your world has collapsed. By the end of that day, you could see it on me. I fainted. I started convulsing. My body just collapsed.”

Arbel was determined to hold everything in until Ariel returned. “He is the person closest to me, the one I want to share with and tell. And we’re not there yet. It’s very hard. I so appreciate and admire and love the hostages who manage to sit down and open their mouths. To tell it, to open up their trauma.”

Speaking to the Daily Mail, Arbel said she had been repressing everything until fellow hostage Romi Gonen spoke about the sexual harassment she had also endured in captivity. Everything Gonen went through, “I went through almost every day in captivity. I tried to end it three times. I felt I couldn’t go on. There were moments when I thought it was the only way out.”

What kept her alive, she admitted, was her love for Cunio. “Every time I remembered Ariel, it gave me the strength to keep breathing.”

The couple have launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise £1.2 million (NIS 5 million) to help rebuild their lives.

In July 2025, the Dinah Report established that sexual violence was “widespread and systematic” during the 7 October Hamas attacks in southern Israel, with rape and gang rape occurring in at least six different locations.

Based on testimonies from 15 returned hostages, the report was compiled by Israeli legal experts with authors determined it would attempt “to set the historical record straight: Hamas used sexual violence as a tactical weapon of war”.