A 21-year-old Israeli who was released after two years of captivity in Gaza spoke for the first time in a TV interview about the nightmare he lived through.

Rom Braslavski had been abducted by members of Islamic Jihad on October 7, 2023 while he was working as a security guard at the Nova music festival and he was freed last month as part of the ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel.

As he revealed on Channel 13’s “Hazinor,” during his captivity he endured psychological and physical torture, including sexual abuse.

“They stripped me completely, they even took my underwear. They tied me when I was fully naked. I was destroyed, without food, and I felt like I was dying,” Braslavski said. “I prayed to God, I begged Him to save me, to get me out of all this. You think ‘what the hell is happening?’”

His testimony captures the horror experienced by Israeli hostages at the hands of their Palestinian captors. “There was sexual violence — and its main purpose was to humiliate me,” he said. “Their goal was to crush my dignity. And that’s exactly what they did.”

When journalist Roni Aviram asked if there were additional assaults, Braslavski confirmed that there were. “Yes. It is hard for me to speak about that part of my captivity. I don’t like to talk about it. It is hard. It was the most horrific thing.”

In his interview the 21-year-old — who had been taken captive while trying to help an injured person at the Nova Festival — called his torturers “worse than Nazis.” “They did things that even the Nazis did not do in Hitler’s era. You just pray for it to stop,” he said, referring to the nightmare he lived through.

According to Braslavski, every day of his captivity was another brutal ordeal. “After each day, after every beating, I told myself: ‘I survived one more day in hell. Tomorrow morning I will wake up to another hell. And then another. And then another.’ (The torture) never ended… I came back after I met the devil,” he added.

This past August, the family of Rom Braslavski approved the release of excerpts from a video distributed by Islamic Jihad which shows him skeletal, weakened, unable to stand, begging for his life.

His mother, Tami, who fought non-stop for two years for his release, revealed that his captors tried to tempt him with food in exchange for converting to Islam, but he refused because he did not want to betray his Jewish identity.

Last month, Rom Braslavski was recorded on video greeting members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) at his release, wrapped in the Israeli flag.

While female Hamas hostages such as Amit Sussana and Ilana Grijzewski have spoken openly about the sexual abuse they suffered while captive, the testimony of Rom Braslavski is the first by a male survivor describing similar experiences.