Freed Israeli Hostage Gives Raw Account of Her Captivity

An Israeli woman held captive by Hamas in Gaza for two months says she was kept in a small room of a hospital and visited by a nurse, who "went along with it." Sharon Aloni Cunio was released from captivity at the end of November along with her twin 3-year-old daughters, Yuli and Emma. Her husband, David, remains captive in Gaza. In a Wednesday interview, Cunio told CNN's Anderson Cooper that the family was kidnapped Oct. 7 after militants set fire to their home in the kibbutz of Nir Oz, forcing them to flee their safe room. She said Emma was separated from the family amid the chaos before a reunion at the Nasser hospital in southern Gaza, where dozens of hostages were locked in at least three 12'-by12' rooms without toilets or showers.

She said hostages had to knock on the door to use the bathroom. "Sometimes they would open after five minutes, sometimes it would take a few hours," said 34-year-old Cunio. "It was really hard when we all had diarrhea and vomiting," she continued, noting the hostages received moldy food. She said a male nurse would "come see us every other day. He knew who we are. He went along with it." CNN noted it could not independently verify the account, which "potentially backs up US and Israeli assessments that hospitals were used to shelter hostages." Cunio said she was initially taken to a residence in Gaza but moved to Nasser hospital after "the house next door was bombed" and "everything broke on us," per i24 News.

"They brought in an ambulance [and] disguised David as a corpse," Cunio told CNN, suggesting some element of concealment inside the hospital. "They put me in traditional Arab clothes and they put Yuli on me and covered her with a sheet," she added. Once inside the hospital, the couple were reunited with Emma, whom they had not seen since Oct. 7, she said. "Life since then cannot even be defined as life," Cunio said, per the Jerusalem Post, describing her "paralyzing fear of not knowing what [David's] condition is for over 50 days." Before Cunio's release, he "told me to promise ... that I would shout his cry" and "I will do it until my last breath for him," she added. "Let them harness the world to this and bring the abductees home at any cost." (More Israel-Hamas war stories.)