Freed hostage David Cunio says he weighed suicide by overdosing during captivity

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.

‘The worst day of my life’

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.

‘Collect a lot of pills and down them in one go’

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.”