Israeli Gaza hostage David Cunio, whose abduction was spotlighted by Tom Shoval’s 2025 documentary A Letter To David, was among 20 people due to be released alive along with his brother Ariel on Monday as part of the Gaza ceasefire deal.
The brothers were kidnapped from the Nir Oz Kibbutz during the Hamas terror attacks of October 7, 2023, in which more than 1,200 people were killed and another 251 abducted.
They were on a list published by Hamas in the early hours of Monday of 20 Israeli hostages who will be freed after two years of captivity in Gaza, under the first phase of a Gaza ceasefire brokered by U.S. President Donald Trump and team.
Heralded as an historic moment, the Gaza ceasefire accord will involve the release of 20 Israeli hostages and nearly 2,000 Palestinians from Israeli jails. The bodies of another 28 Israeli hostages who died in captivity are also due to be returned.
The hope is that the deal will bring an end to the two-year conflict between Hamas and Israel, which has resulted in death of more than 67,000 Palestinians and destruction of Gaza.
The world’s media was focused on the staggered release of the hostages on Monday morning, with a first batch of seven people handed over to the Red Cross in the early hours.
They were named as Omri Miran, Matan Angrest, Ziv Berman, Gali Berman, Guy Gilboa-Dalal, Alon Ohel, and Eitan Mor
News footage showed Red Cross vehicles traveling through the rubble of Gaza on route to an Israeli military base in Southern Israel. They were reported to have crossed the border into Israel at around 9.40am local time.
Shortly after Air Force One was captured landing at Ben Gurion Airport, where Trump was greeted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara, US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, adviser Jared Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump.
In Tel Aviv, large crowds gathered in Hostage Square – the site of protest campaigns calling for the return of hostages over the past two years – to celebrate and watch large screens showing the progress of those being released.
David Cunio and his brother were among 76 people kidnapped from the kibbutz Nir Oz some four miles (7km) from the Gaza border, which was once home to some 400 people, while another 47 were killed.
That same day, David’s wife Sharon, and their three-year-old twin daughters, Yuli and Emma, as well as Ariel’s partner Yehoud were also abducted. Sharon, Yuli and Emma were released November 2023, while Yehoud was freed earlier this year.
Shoval captured David Cunio’s plight and that of his family as they agonized over the return of the brothers in his very personal film A Letter To David, produced by Nancy Spielberg, which world premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.
The director first befriended David Cunio and his twin brother Eitan when they starred in his first feature Youth which world premiered to acclaim in the Berlinale’s Panorama section in 2013.
In a strange quirk, the Cunios played brothers who kidnap a young woman using a military service-issued rifle in an ill-advised scheme to raise funds to pay off family debts.
Eitan Cunio, who also lived in Nir Oz, escaped on October 7 after he hid in his home’s saferoom. He gives a harrowing account in A Letter to David of how he thought he would be burned alive after the attackers started setting fire to buildings.
Mixing extracts from Youth; footage of the development and shooting of the film, and interviews with family members, the cinematic letter adds flesh and blood to the man now staring out of “Bring Him Home” posters.
The other hostages due to be released on Monday include Bar Abraham Kupershtein, Evyatar David, Yosef-Chaim Ohana, Segev Kalfon, Avinatan Or, Elkana Bohbot, Maxim Herkin, Nimrod Cohen, Matan Angrest, Matan Zangauker, Eitan Horn and Rom Braslavski.
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