Since Sharon Aloni Cunio was released from captivity in Gaza last November, she has struggled to enjoy basic comforts: eating as much as she wants, using the bathroom when she wants, rolling cigarettes beside her cats in her childhood home.
Ms. Cunio, her husband, David, and their now 4-year-old twin daughters were among the roughly 250 hostages abducted by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. She and her daughters were released along with more than 100 others during a weeklong cease-fire. David is still in Gaza.
“I’m still with him in there,” she said. “As long as he’s suffering, I’m suffering alongside him.”
Roughly 101 people — including women, children and older people — remain in Hamas’s clutches a year after the militant group carried out its brutal attack on southern Israel. Hamas views them as bargaining chips in cease-fire negotiations, which have ground to a halt.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has vowed to continue the war in Gaza until Hamas is obliterated, a pledge that some fear has effectively ruled out the possibility of reaching a deal that would bring the hostages home.
“With every day that goes by without an agreement on the horizon, you break just a little bit more,” Ms. Cunio said.
Relatives have organized mass protests in Israel to try to pressure Mr. Netanyahu to reach a deal. Slowly, however, hope has faded. Israeli forces have retrieved the bodies of more than 30 hostages since October, some most likely killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, according to the military. Israeli authorities presume dozens more are dead.
Ms. Cunio has struggled to return to something resembling a normal life. Air-raid sirens warning of incoming missiles snap her back to the terrifying hours in which militants set her home ablaze. In the first few months after arriving home, she feared that her captors might return to reclaim her.
“I’m not strong anymore. I’m broken,” Ms. Cunio said. “My soul is broken.”
She tries to stay strong for her two daughters, Julie and Emma. Once outgoing, the girls now have fits of rage and wake up from nightmares in which “the bad people” come back to abduct them to Gaza, she said.
In July, her family gathered in the backyard of her parents’ home in Yavne, in central Israel, to celebrate the twins’ birthday. The girls blew out the candles and quietly wished for their father to come home.
Ms. Cunio’s kibbutz, Nir Oz, was one of the hardest-hit communities in the Hamas attack. More than 65 people were taken hostage from Nir Oz, including Ms. Cunio’s sister and niece — who were also released in November — and her husband’s brother and his partner.
By the time the Israeli military arrived later that day, scores of Gazan militants and civilians were already gone, leaving much of the village a smoldering ruin.
Ms. Cunio’s family; her sister, Danielle Aloni; and niece had been huddled in a fortified safe room. Mr. Cunio managed to hold the door shut, but in an attempt to force them out, the attackers set their home ablaze, sending dense clouds of smoke billowing under the door.
“It doesn’t look like we’re going to make it out of here,” Ms. Cunio sobbed in a voice message to her family around 11 a.m. “We love you.”
Mr. Cunio opened a window and crept out with Julie before shutting it as more attackers approached, Ms. Cunio said. The two did not make it far before their capture.
As more smoke filled the room, Ms. Cunio’s sister told her to open the window and give themselves up. It would be better for them to be shot dead than die of asphyxiation, she said.
“We shouldn’t have to watch our daughters choke to death,” Ms. Cunio recalled her sister saying. “It’s better for us to get this over with quickly.”
The attackers, who Ms. Cunio said were wearing civilian clothes, began dragging the women and children out of the shelter, their faces blackened with soot.
Soon, they were in Gaza. She and her husband were reunited, but Emma was nowhere to be found. Outside the building where they were being held, Israel was carrying out its devastating assault on the enclave in retaliation for the Oct. 7 attack.
On their ninth night in captivity, an Israeli bombardment destroyed the complex next to their building, causing part of it to collapse, Ms. Cunio said. Broken glass sliced open her head while her lungs filled with dust and smoke.
“It shattered even the slightest hope that someone knew where we were and they might come to rescue us,” she said.
The group was rushed to a different location, which Ms. Cunio said in previous interviews was a hospital. In her conversation with The New York Times, she declined to give more details, citing fears for her husband’s safety.
After a few days in their new hideaway, she suddenly heard the voice of a child drifting into the room. It was her daughter Emma.
“It was even more meaningful for me than the moment I gave birth to her,” she said. “It was getting her back from the dead.”
The reunited family was packed into a room with other hostages. Ms. Cunio remembers trying to shield her daughters from the horror of the situation, telling them that their captors were in fact protecting them rather than holding them hostage.
Six weeks later, Ms. Cunio and her daughters were freed in the weeklong truce in November between Israel and Hamas. Although the cease-fire was intended to free mostly women and children, she hoped that if it held long enough, her husband might also be released.
But a few days later, Ms. Cunio awoke to push notifications on her phone: Air-raid sirens were sounding in communities near the Gaza border. The fragile truce — already teetering — had broken down, with both Israel and Hamas blaming each other.
“I simply collapsed,” she said.
After several days of rehabilitation, Ms. Cunio brought her daughters to live with her parents in Yavne. Most of Nir Oz’s other residents still live together in a makeshift community in central Israel, but Ms. Cunio said she could not bear to join them.
“Every meeting with them hurls me straight back to that day,” she said. “There’s a deep sense of grief — for our life before, which is just a constant reminder of what we’ll never have again.”
And with David still in Gaza, she cannot begin to move on, either.
Looking at her daughters can sometimes tear her apart, as they look just like their father, she said. After the girls leave the house for school in the morning, she allows herself to break down.
“I put on a mask in the mornings and the afternoons, when I’m with them,” Ms. Cunio said. “The rest of the time, I lose it, I cry, I hide myself away.”
Last year, Ms. Cunio and her husband celebrated a decade of being together. They had gently teased each other about finally going their separate ways, that maybe after 10 years it was time to “call it quits,” Ms. Cunio recalled.
The joke still haunts her. “What we made fun of somehow came true,” she said.
The endless roller coaster of leaks by Israeli and Hamas officials on the cease-fire talks to free the hostages has become exhausting. After a while, Ms. Cunio stopped allowing herself to feel hopeful.
She often thinks about the last time she saw her husband. Their Hamas captors had informed them that he was being taken away. As both of them cried, he asked her to fight for him, to make sure he was not abandoned to his fate in Gaza.
“I’m scared to death,” she remembers him telling her, before the militants ushered him away.
Ms. Cunio later learned from another freed hostage that David had been taken into the darkness of Hamas’s underground tunnels. She has heard nothing about him since.
The post She and Her Husband Were Taken by Hamas. She Was Freed. He’s Still in Gaza. appeared first on New York Times.
