A year after their home in Israel was torched and her family was taken by attackers on Oct. 7, a wife and mother clings to the hope that her husband might still come home alive.
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.
