David Cunio, one of the Israelis abducted by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023, gives a harrowing account of his nearly two years in Hamas captivity in Gaza, describing starvation, psychological torment, underground imprisonment and the struggle to survive for the sake of his family.
In an interview aired on Channel 12 on Monday, Cunio detailed his abduction alongside his wife, Sharon, their twin daughters Yuli and Emma, and other family members, as well as the brutal conditions he endured during 738 days in Hamas captivity.
The ordeal began in the early hours of Oct. 7, 2023, when air sirens and gunfire woke the family in their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz. Hamas terrorists stormed the kibbutz, setting houses on fire and killing and abducting residents.
While the rest of the extended Cunio family was fighting for their lives in nearby houses (David’s brothers Eitan and Ariel would be kidnapped separately), David tried to shield his family inside their safe room from the smoke and flames, but when breathing became impossible, he attempted to escape with one of his daughters out the window. They were captured in the yard.
According to Channel 12, David and his family were separated in the chaos and violence. He and his wife and one daughter, Yuli, whom he had tried to escape with, found themselves placed in a vehicle with other kibbutz residents.
They witnessed a Hamas convoy hit by fire from an Israeli helicopter en route to Gaza, killing another hostage, Efrat Katz. They were wounded by shrapnel.
For the first days of captivity, David was held with Sharon and Yuli. David described the anguish of not knowing whether Emma was alive.
“We were completely devastated by the thought that Emma wasn’t with us,” he told Channel 12. His wife kept blaming herself for Emma’s disappearance.
On the 10th day of the war, the building where they were held was bombed and David, Sharon and Yuli were taken to Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, disguised to blend in with the local population. There, they were reunited with Emma, who was severely neglected, malnourished and traumatized. Hamas attempted to film the family for propaganda purposes.
David said Emma initially did not recognize them. Only after Sharon sang to her did she calm down. Emma later talked of violent scenes she had witnessed, of a “man covered in red.” She would scream at night from the nightmares.
“The terrorists would shout at us to silence her,” David recalled. “How do you silence a 3-year-old who is screaming in terror?”
On the 49th day of captivity, David was separated from his wife and daughters when they were released as part of a ceasefire deal in November 2023. Sharon and the twins spent a total of 52 days in captivity. David remained behind.
“A rock lifted from my heart. When they left, I told myself I just had to survive,” he told Channel 12. “But after that, it only got worse.”
David could not know he would be held for another 682 days.
He was moved underground, into Hamas’s tunnel network, where he spent most of his captivity. He described extreme hunger, dehydration and physical exhaustion, often surviving on as little as half a pita and 250 milliliters of water per day. “It’s total darkness,” he said. “You hear people’s stomachs. People faint. You get dizzy just from standing up.”
David told Channel 12 that he was moved repeatedly through tunnels, sometimes crawling for hours through narrow passageways. In one forced march, hostages walked nearly 20 kilometers underground in a single day, bleeding and collapsing from exhaustion, he recalled.
During his captivity, David encountered other hostages, including friends and kibbutz members, many of whom later died. He described seeing elderly captives in skeletal condition and reuniting briefly with close friends before being separated again. The psychological toll, he said, was relentless.
David also described systematic psychological abuse. Hamas captors repeatedly lied to him about his wife, telling him she had “moved on” and stopped fighting for his release. Over time, he said, the lies began to penetrate. “As unreal as it sounds, that’s where it sounds most real,” he said. “You start thinking maybe she can’t wait forever, maybe she should go on with her life.”
He said these manipulations led him to moments of despair and suicidal thoughts, though fellow captives helped keep him going. He clung to small items—a rubber band belonging to his daughters, handmade necklaces he had made for them from date pits—as emotional anchors, praying daily and imagining speaking to his wife and children.
Footage later recovered by the Israel Defense Forces showed David being forced to beg for his life in a Hamas propaganda video, wearing the same rubber band that helped sustain him.
In early 2025, a new deal was reached, and some hostages were released. David was again left behind, forced to say goodbye on camera as others were freed. “We were really crying,” he said. “We were happy for them, but we knew that if the next stage didn’t happen, we were dead.”
Fighting soon resumed, and conditions deteriorated further. David said captors withheld any news about his family and their advocacy efforts on his behalf, deepening his isolation.
Finally, in Oct. 2025, David was informed that a deal had been signed and that he was going home. In a hangar shortly before release, he was reunited with his brother Ariel. Only during a video call after their release did they learn that all immediate family members had survived.
Reuniting with his daughters after two years was overwhelming, David said. “I got down on my knees, and they ran to me,” he told Channel 12. “I couldn’t believe how much they’d grown.”
Now home, David says the real work of recovery has begun. He described physical symptoms of trauma, emotional crashes after the initial reunion and the challenge of rebuilding family life. Still, he emphasized moments of joy as his daughters slowly regain trust in him.
“It’s not easy to come back from captivity and rebuild a family,” David said. “But little by little, things start to work out. And it’s fun. It’s fun that they want me next to them.”
David hopes to build a new home with his family in a new kibbutz and to give his daughters the childhood that was so violently interrupted.
Former hostage David Cunio said that he considered collecting pills so that he could overdose while being held in torturous conditions by Hamas terrorists in Gaza, in a harrowing interview aired on Monday.
Speaking to Channel 12 news, Cunio also recalled the terrible uncertainty he felt not knowing the fate of his brother Ariel, who was also kidnapped with Ariel’s partner Arbel Yehoud, and after being separated from his own wife and children when they were released from captivity before him.
Cunio described the morning of October 7, 2023, when he was kidnapped from his home in Kibbutz Nir Oz as Hamas terrorists attacked the community, burning homes, killing residents, and kidnapping people.
David was abducted along with his wife, Sharon, twin daughters Yuli and Emma, and Sharon’s sister, Danielle Aloni, and Danielle’s daughter Emilia, 5, who were visiting them for the holiday weekend.
“Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I catch Sharon being dragged by one of the terrorists, and I shout, ‘My wife, my wife,” Cunio said, adding that they had initially been separated from Emma.
“We are completely consumed by the thought that Emma is not with us,” Cunio said. “We keep asking, telling them there is another girl who looks exactly like Yuli, whose name is Emma, and who is her twin, and if they can find her. But no one knows; it was chaos. We were not eating or drinking much; we couldn’t bear the thought that Emma was not with us.”
“It was very difficult to function there, but I felt the need to protect them all the time because I was the only man there,” Cunio said of his time in captivity with his family in Gaza.
“Many times I saw the two Hamas terrorists that were guarding us sleeping, and a knife under their bed, and I wondered if I could do something, maybe I could save us. But you think about this moment again, and then you say — I eliminated both of them, you leave, and what will you do? You would go out to the masses, and they’d devour you.”
Cunio said he used a whiteboard to write the Hebrew word for “rescue,” and put it close to the window, with the hope that an Israeli drone would see it, and troops might come and save them.
After the home they were held in was hit in an airstrike on the tenth day of the war, they were moved to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. Cunio said he was disguised as a dead body in a bag, while Sharon wore a hijab when they were taken there.
At the hospital, he and his wife and daughter Yuli were reunited with their second daughter, Emma, who was thin and had a rash. At first, she didn’t recognize her parents and sister, until Sharon started singing to her, Cunio said.
After witnessing the bloody scenes at the kibbutz, Emma suffered night terrors and would wake up screaming.
“The terrorists told us to silence her. How can I silence her? A 3-year-old girl. Smack her? What can I do?” Cunio recalled.
Sharon and the twins were released on November 27, 2023, as part of a temporary ceasefire deal brokered by Qatar and the United States between Hamas and Israel.
“The worst day of my life is when I separated from Yuli, Emma, and Sharon,” he said. “Terrible crying in the room. I kept telling Sharon that I’m scared to death. I asked everyone in the room not to give up on me, and to get me out, because I knew everyone was going to get out.”
After the truce lapsed, Cunio was taken to a vehicle and met Itzik Elgarat. Elgarat was later murdered in captivity, and his body was returned to Israel in February 2025.
The two men were taken together to a tunnel, where Cunio asked his captors about his brother Eitan, whom he hadn’t heard from. It was only on his final day of captivity that he discovered that Eitan had survived the massacre.
The terrorist claimed there was an Eitan with them, who turned out to be hostage Eitan Horn. Reluctant to speak his brother’s name, Cunio nicknamed Horn “Pancho” during their time together, he said.
In the tunnel, there was also a room of elderly hostages, who were later murdered, according to Cunio. “Eighty-year-olds. They were so thin. It was inhumane.”
Yarden Bibas, “my best friend,” was also in the tunnel, Cunio added. “I was sure they had killed him. We ran toward each other, hugged and kissed and cried.”
Cunio said he asked to remain with Bibas, but the terrorists said it was impossible. For most of his time in captivity, Cunio was held with Eitan Horn, his brother Iair Horn, and Sagui Dekel-Chen.
Days after arriving, Cunio said he again met Bibas, who appeared pale, having found out that his wife Shiri and their children had been murdered by their captors.
“Shiri was like my sister. Sharon and I knew them. They were a perfect couple. I don’t know how to comprehend something like this. I started to cry and hugged him,” he said, adding that he tried to convince Bibas that the terrorists had lied or made a mistake.
Cunio also recalled Hamas’s Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar, who was killed by IDF troops in October 2024, visiting their tunnel, and asking Bibas if there was something he could do for him. Bibas recounted the interaction in his interview in May.
Bibas told Sinwar that he wanted to be released before his slain wife and children so that he could receive them and remain until then with Cunio. “After five days, they separated us,” Cunio said.
Conditions were so bad in captivity that Cunio considered suicide, he told Channel 12.
“I had many different thoughts — perhaps to collect a lot of pills and down them in one go,” Cunio said, but added that, to his luck, he was with good people.
During the interview, Cunio described suffering from starvation and psychological torture. “For a long period, we were on 250 milliliters of water and half a pita a day,” he said.
“It’s pitch black, and you can hear your stomach,” he said. “You beg them to bring you another spoonful of jam, another little something, but they don’t give you anything. And day by day you feel weaker, and you get thinner, and we had to get up every time they passed, and it was, for us, the hardest thing we did that day. Dizziness, people were about to faint.”
“At the start, when they tell you lies about your wife, you don’t believe it,” Cunio continued. “But as time passes, it seeps in, and they tell you, ‘Your wife has moved on, your wife isn’t fighting for you, your wife is with someone else.’ This shit slowly seeps in. As unreal as it sounds, that’s where it sounds the most real.”
He described being taken on an exhausting 20-kilometer walk through tunnels to move locations due to the intensifying fighting in the area he was held.
“From 10 a.m. to 11 p.m., we walked in tunnels. Crawling, tunnels of half a meter, 1.6 meters, 1.3 meters,” he said, adding that the hostages were only granted two-minute stops, though they were exhausted and bleeding.
Cunio also said he experienced lucid dreams of being at home with his family, but knew that when he woke up, he would still be in captivity.
In January 2025, Iair Horn and Dekel-Chen were released, while Cunio and Eitan Horn remained behind. Cunio’s face was blurred in a propaganda video published by Hamas showing the separation of the Horn brothers.
“We really cried, we were really sad. In those moments, we said to ourselves, if now he doesn’t sign on the second phase, we are dead, we don’t have a chance,” Cunio said, appearing to refer to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The war did resume, and the second phase of that ceasefire was abandoned, and Cunio remained in captivity until October 8.
The night before his release, Cunio was reunited with his brother Ariel after he was moved to a new location.
“It was about 3-4 in the morning. I was half asleep. Suddenly, the door of the hangar opens, and someone yells ‘David Cunio,’ and in that moment, I understand that Ariel is coming,” Cunio said.
“I raise my head, and I see a tall man with long hair, and I don’t register that this is him, so then I approach him and I understand. And I start to cry and hug him and don’t stop kissing him everywhere on his body. I was the happiest person in the world that at least my little brother is okay, but I don’t know what is with the family, and he also doesn’t know,” he said.
In a video call with his family organized by Hamas on the morning of his release, he saw, for the first time, that all his relatives were alive.
“It is not easy to return from captivity and raise a family like nothing happened, especially with little girls,” Cunio said. “They are learning to rely on me again and want me around more and more. And these things start to work out, and it’s fun. It’s fun that they want me around them.”
