Former hostage recounts horrific suffering in Hamas captivity

David Cunio describes starvation, psychological torture and forced marches through Gaza tunnels.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Former hostage David Cunio described the brutal conditions he endured in Hamas captivity in an interview aired Monday on Channel 12.

Cunio, his wife Sharon and their three-year-old twin daughters, Emma and Yuli, were abducted from their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz after Hamas terrorists set the house ablaze during their Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel.

For 10 agonizing days, the family was separated from Emma. Cunio said they were “completely consumed” by fear for her fate.

They were eventually reunited at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis after an Israeli airstrike hit the building where they were being held.

Emma was very thin, covered with rashes and cried inconsolably, Cunio recalled, not recognizing her parents at first. Only when Sharon sang her a familiar children’s song did she calm down.

At night, when she would scream from nightmares and the terrorists demanded that she be quiet, Cunio said he felt helpless.

“How can I silence her? A 3-year-old girl. What, I’m going to smack her? What can I do? And they’re yelling at us to be quiet. This sh** is simply unbelievable,” Cunio said.

Sharon and the twins were released at the end of November as part of the first hostage deal for women and children.

Cunio called the moment he said goodbye to them “the worst day of my life,” recalling “terrible crying in the room.”

Cunio said that during his 738 days in captivity, his captors subjected him to relentless psychological torment, repeatedly telling him Sharon wasn’t fighting for him or that she was now with someone else.

“Slowly, this sh** seeps in,” he said, “as unreal as it sounds.”

He found himself telling Sharon in his mind that he was letting her go, because he would not get out of Gaza alive and she had to live her life.

After their release, Cunio was transferred into Hamas’ tunnel network, where he spent the remainder of his captivity, mostly alongside fellow hostages Eitan and Iair Horn, Sagui Dekel Chen and Nimrod Cohen.

They were starved, he said, living for a long time on 250 ml of water and half a pita a day.

“You beg them to bring you another spoonful of jam, another little something, but they don’t give you anything,” he recalled. “Day by day you feel weaker … and we had to stand up every time they passed.”

That was very difficult, he noted, because getting up made them dizzy, and they fainted very easily.

As fighting intensified nearby, captors forced the hostages to march for hours through the tunnels.

“We have no food, how can we walk so long? From 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. we walked in tunnels,” Cunio recounted. “Crawling, tunnels of half a meter, 1.6 meters, 1.3 meters. We walked almost 20 kilometers in the tunnels there. With two-minute stops each time. People are exhausted, finished. Bleeding from the head, from the shoulders.”

He described moments of despair so deep that he considered suicide.

“Luckily I was with good people who constantly lifted me up,” he said.

He hung onto the thought that he had to survive to get back to his wife and children, and spoke to them “all the time.”

“I had a little rubber hairband of my girls that I accidentally found in my pocket, and necklaces I made from date pits, and I’d sit with them, close my eyes and pray,” he said. “I’d speak to them, tell them I loved them, that they were the most precious thing to me in the whole world.”

“Each time you pray, you cry,” he added, “but it gave me strength… helped me a little to absorb as much as possible what was happening around me.”

He was reunited with his brother Ariel only hours before the final group of live hostages was released in October, after not knowing his fate for two years.

Cunio was overwhelmed when he saw his daughters again.

“I’m shaking all over, I don’t know what’s coming, I don’t know how to talk to them,” he said.

“The thing I wanted most was for them to run to me and hug me. I got down on my knees … and suddenly I see these two angels, and I tell them, ‘Daddy’s here.’ And they run to me. I hug them, I look at them, and I can’t believe how they’ve grown.”