We like to optimize our worldview with a very pretty story about rules, red lines, and international order. We picture men in expensive suits in Geneva signing papers that promise dignity, ticking the boxes for human rights. It is all very polite, very civilized, and as the latest updates from the **Hamas hostage crisis** prove, it is a complete and total farce.

**Guy Gilboa-Dalal** has returned from the dark, and the story he brings back should shatter the user experience of our polite little glass house. He wasn't just taken from the **Nova music festival**. He wasn't just held in a tunnel under the ground in Gaza. He was a victim of **sexual abuse in captivity** by the man holding the gun.

Let’s pause and really look at that data point. We aren't talking about the usual ugly business of war—the rockets, the soldiers, the strategy. We are talking about the deepest, dirtiest kind of power one human can have over another. This young man was dragged from a place of light and sound into the silence of the earth. And there, in the dark, his captor decided that taking his freedom wasn't enough. He had to take his dignity, too.

The details are sickening, but they are necessary to hear for full context. He was told, quite simply, that he would die if he spoke. "If you say anything, I will kill you." That is the negotiation. That is the reality of **hostage trauma**. While the world debated context and history, a man in a tunnel was being broken down into pieces. This is the tragic comedy of our species. We send aid trucks and write strong letters, but we cannot stop a monster in the dark from being a monster.

This is where my patience with the "civilized world" runs out. We treat these events like they are anomalies, rare accidents in the algorithm. They are not. This is what happens when the thin veneer of society is peeled back. The captor didn't care about the United Nations or search trends. He didn't care about public opinion polls. He had a gun, he had a victim, and he had the cover of darkness. That is the only law that mattered in that tunnel: the law of brute force.

It is painfully ironic to watch the news anchors discuss this with their serious faces. They use words like "alleged" and "reports," keeping the content sterile. They want to keep it clean for the audience eating their breakfast. But there is nothing clean about **sexual violence in war**. Gilboa-Dalal held this secret inside him like a stone. He had to survive the abuse to survive the war. It is a level of psychological torture that most of us, sitting in our comfortable chairs, cannot even begin to understand.

The silence he was forced to keep is the most damning part. It wasn't just the silence of the tunnel; it was the silence of fear. It creates a wall between the victim and the rest of humanity. Even now that he is out, that wall is still there. He speaks, but can we really hear him? We nod our heads and say, "How terrible," and then we scroll to the next video on our phones. We consume his trauma as content. That is our role in this absurd theater.

What happened to Guy Gilboa-Dalal is not just a crime; it is a mirror. It shows us that all our talk of progress is fragile. We haven't evolved as much as we think. We have just built better hiding spots. We have built bureaucracies to manage the horror, to file it away in reports so we don't have to smell it.

So, the next time a politician stands up at a podium and talks about "red lines" and "international standards," remember the tunnel. Remember that down in the dirt, the only standard is power. The suits and the ties and the treaties are just costumes we wear to pretend we aren't animals. But every now and then, someone comes back from the dark to remind us of exactly what we are.

***

### References & Fact-Check * **Original Report**: For the full account of **Guy Gilboa-Dalal's** experience and the allegations of sexual abuse during his captivity, refer to the New York Times report: [A Hamas Hostage’s Secret Ordeal](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/world/middleeast/hamas-hostage-abuse.html). * **Context**: This account relates to the survivors of the October 7 attacks and the kidnapping of civilians from the Nova music festival.