(Israel Hayom) Rom Braslavski, one of the 20 hostages freed by Hamas on Monday as part of a US-brokered ceasefire, was held alone for two years, and was offered better treatment if he agreed to convert to Islam.

His testimony was shared with the media via his mother, Tami Braslavski, at Ramat Gan’s Sheba Hospital, where he is being treated.

During some of those two years, his only company was the bodies of murdered hostages, she said. She added that upon his return to Israel, he had reported the location of the bodies to Brig. Gen. (res.) Gal Hirsch, Israel’s National Coordinator for the Hostages and the Missing.

Rom Braslavski, 21, in a video released by terrorists holding him in the Gaza Strip, August 2025. Credit: Courtesy.

Tami revealed that her son had not been held in tunnels, and suffers from blood sugar fluctuations due to being force-fed shortly before his release.

During the first four weeks of his captivity, Rom was held in a “bad place,” she said. “He freed himself from handcuffs and set clothes alight, causing a fire. Smoke came pouring out of the room. A Gazan mob began pounding on the windows and the door,” she added.

“Rom became hysterical. ‘What do I do now — if they discover I’m here, I’ll die in a lynching,’ he thought. What went through his head was the Ramallah lynching of Israeli soldiers,” she said, referring to the brutal murder of two Israeli reservists by a mob in the Palestinian city on Oct. 12, 2000, during the Second Intifada.

“He hid under a blanket. Eventually, a mob of some 40 people broke in, and they saw the handcuffs. They then understood that a prisoner was being held captive there.”

“Rom recited the Shema Yisrael prayer to God and told him, ‘I can’t end like this, you didn’t take me out of there to end in a lynching. I’m not going like this.’ Then he heard keys at the door. His abductor suddenly returned. He got rid of the mob and moved Rom to a slightly better place,” she said.

“I’m Jewish, I’m Jewish!”

His captors abused him psychologically, telling him that Iran had bombed Israel, that his parents weren’t at the protests at Hostage Square, she said.

His abductor would come once a day, at noon, to bring him food and take him to the bathroom.

“Now on his return, he keeps saying, ‘I’m Jewish. I’m a strong Jew,’” she added.

“It was so important to him to maintain his Jewish identity because they asked him to convert to Islam and tempted him, saying, ‘If you fast during Ramadan, we’ll give you food and soap. Rom didn’t break. We brought tefillin to the hospital and he put them on.”

“Everyone talks to him and wants to make him happy, and I asked him, ‘Rom, what do you need?’ and he tells me, ‘Mom, I don’t need anything, why would they do this for me?’

“He doesn’t understand how much of a hero he is and how much people want to give to him. He only wants to stand at the window and look at the sky. The air does him good.”

She also said that between April and July, when two videos of him were distributed to the media, his captors stepped up the abuse.

“They would come in several times a day and beat him. But he absorbed it. He told me, ‘Mom, I knew it would pass. I said to myself that it’s only a period, and it will pass, it will end, it will end’ — and that’s how he got through it.”

This is an edited version of an article originally published by Israel Hayom.