Hamas captivity in Gaza is “Russian roulette”, says freed Israeli hostage

Israeli Sharon Alony-Cunio survived 52 days as a hostage in the Gaza Strip with her two young daughters before being released. But she still fears for her husband’s life, who is still in captivity in Palestinian territory.

Now that she has returned home with her 3-year-old twin daughters, Julie and Emma, ​​she is calling for the remaining 137 hostages to be released. “Every minute is crucial. The conditions there are not good and the days are endless,” she told Reuters in her first interview.

“It’s Russian roulette. You don’t know if tomorrow morning they will keep you alive or kill you, just because they want to or because their backs are against the wall”, said Alony-Cunio, 34 years old.

She was one of 240 people taken hostage on October 7 by armed Hamas fighters, who invaded Israel and killed around 1,200 people.

The fighters who took over the kibbutz where Alony-Cunio lived, Nir Oz, which is just over a mile from Gaza, set her house on fire and took her at gunpoint after she climbed out of the window.

She was taken across the border with her husband, David, and one of her twin girls, she said. Her second daughter was held separately in Gaza for 10 days before being reunited in captivity with 12 other hostages in conditions she said were difficult, especially for children.

“Everyone stopped eating because of them [as meninas]. You don’t know if there will be a pita in the evening [pão], so in the morning you save some for the night. Everything is very calculated, a quarter of a pita, half a pita to save for the next morning,” she reported.

Sometimes they were fed dates and cheese and at other times they divided the meat, rice and rations for six people among the 12.

Waiting to go to the bathroom was a problem for the girls, according to their mother, so they had to use a sink and a trash can.

“Sometimes, when there was a power cut, they would let us open the door, open the curtain and then we would whisper. How is it possible to keep a child together for 12 hours with just whispers?”, she pointed out.

The group of hostages she was in was kept above ground and moved a few times, she explained, but with her recent memories and the fact that her husband was still there, Alony-Cunio was reluctant to give more details about her capture and the time she was in. was a hostage.

But one of the biggest difficulties, according to her, was simply not knowing what was being done to get them out of there.

“Every day there was crying, frustration and anxiety. How long were we going to stay there? Have they forgotten about us? Did they give up on us?”, she remembers.

In a seven-day truce, more than 100 hostages were released. The rest are still incommunicado while Israel bombs Gaza.

More than 18,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to local health authorities, controlled by Hamas.

Many families of the 137 hostages still in the territory, whose names and photos on posters are spread across the streets of Israel, are scared.

“My daughters are devastated. I am torn apart without my second half, the love of my life, the father of my daughters who ask me every day: where is daddy?”, says Alony-Cunio.

David was separated from them three days before his release on November 27, before fighting resumed. The top priority, she said, should be freeing the remaining hostages.

“I’m terrified that I’m going to get bad news that he’s no longer alive,” Alony-Cunio said.

“We are not just names on a poster. We are human beings, of flesh and blood. My daughters’ father is there, my partner, and many other fathers, sons, mothers, brothers.”, she concluded.