WASHINGTON — High above the clouds, somewhere over the Midwest, Alana Zeitchik’s phone flashed with the news.
Hamas and Israel had agreed to the terms of a ceasefire, brokered by the White House, that could end more than two years of fighting and bring about the release of hostages still held in Gaza.
Zeitchik couldn’t wait to get off the plane. She’d been working and praying for this day. Seven Jewish members of her family in Israel were abducted by Hamas fighters on Oct. 7, 2023. Five of them – two cousins and their three young daughters – were among the first hostages released as part of a temporary ceasefire in November 2023. But her cousin’s husband, David Cunio, and his brother Ariel Cunio stayed behind in captivity.
Weeping, Zeitchik frantically messaged her family. A text message from one of her cousins confirmed what she’d read on the Los Angeles-to-New York flight.
David and Ariel were coming home. Soon.
“I just wanted to jump out of my skin with excitement,” she said.
But she didn’t. There was still work to do.
Zeitchik and her cousins are close. Like sisters. It happens when you grow up with only brothers.
Sharon Cunio was the closest thing she had to a little sister. As teenagers, they used to go around town during Zeitchik’s yearly vacation to Israel and talk about boys.
Her other cousin, Danielle Alony, was like an older sister. Zeitchik used to steal cigarettes from her in high school when Danielle came to New Jersey to work as a nanny.
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Their kidnapping hit Zeitchik like a punch to the gut. Sharon and David were at home with their twin daughters, Emma and Yuli, who were just 3 at the time, in Kibbutz Nir Oz in southern Israel, near the Gaza Strip, when armed Hamas militants came barreling through. Danielle and her daughter, Amelia, who was 5, were visiting for the weekend.
David’s brother, Ariel, was at another house in the same kibbutz.
All seven were taken hostage. They were among the 251 other men, women and children kidnapped in the brutal attack on Israel that left 1,400 dead.
Back in Brooklyn, Zeitchik made it her mission to find her family. Two days earlier, she’d left her job at a social media tech platform. The search for her missing relatives would become her full-time job.
She turned to traditional and social media to keep the world focused on the hostages. She gave interviews. Met with lawmakers. Hand-delivered petitions to the United Nations. Sent a flood of long-distance texts and voice messages to her family back in Israel.
Then, seven weeks after they were kidnapped, a breakthrough. Danielle and Amelia were released the day after Thanksgiving as part of a temporary ceasefire brokered by Qatar and the United States. Three days later, Sharon and the twins also were freed.
Zeitchik desperately wanted to see them. To hug them. She boarded a plane to Israel the following February. Sharon was asleep on the couch when she arrived.
“I just crawled in and hugged her forever,” Zeitchik said.
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She always believed they’d come home. But to see them, to know they were alive, was a huge relief – “and it was very emotional,” she said.
However, the family still wasn’t whole. David and Ariel were still missing. Still held hostage somewhere in Gaza.
“Fight for me. Don’t give up,” David, skinny, frail and wounded in the leg, told Sharon as they embraced one last time before her release, she recalled in an interview with The Associated Press.
“Please yell what I cannot yell,” he implored. “I’m scared as hell.”
No one in the family has seen them since. Week after week passed amid reports that some hostages had died in captivity. Still, the family held out hope that David and Ariel were alive. Then, last February, an encouraging sign. A recently released hostage sent Sharon a message that David had been seen just a few days earlier.
There are no reported sightings of Ariel. But both he and David are believed to be alive, according to the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a volunteer organization focused on the safe return of all of the abductees in Gaza.
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Zeitchik’s family has gotten no official word on when David and Ariel will be freed. Maybe next Monday or Tuesday, according to the White House. But exactly when and where, they don’t know.
“We won’t exhale until everyone is home and back in the arms of the people they love,” Zeitchik said.
Even so, they are optimistic. Israel’s full government approved the peace agreement early Friday, Oct. 10, and announced that the ceasefire was in effect. Under the deal, the Israeli military is to partially pull back troops and fully suspend hostilities in Gaza within 24 hours. Hamas is expected to release the 20 living Israeli hostages within 72 hours.
Zeitchik is confident, as much as she can be, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leaders will see the deal through.
“I know there has been a great deal of pressure from the U.S. government on Netanyahu, which is what was needed,” she said. “And he has agreed, which was, for us, the most important part. I also know that the Arab nations have put tremendous pressure on Hamas and really backed them into a corner. So that’s why I’m feeling generally confident right now.”
Still …
She pauses for a second to consider the possibility the deal could unravel.
“Anything could always fall through,” she said. “I didn’t think my family could be kidnapped ever. I now know anything is possible.”
When David and Ariel come home – and she believes they will – the trauma of the past two years won’t be over.
Sharon has been doing her best to raise the twins by herself while fighting for David’s release, Zeitchik said. She hides her depression by putting on a happy face for the girls. They’re 5 now and have gone two years without their dad. They still play the silly games he taught them. They wear T-shirts embossed with a color photo of his smiling face. They freak out at the sound of “red alert” sirens warning of falling rockets.
Amelia, now 7, vividly remembers the kidnapping, the bad guys who took them away, the awful food they ate, and how the water in the shower was frozen. The times they’ve had to take refuge in a bomb shelter have been especially distressing for her.
“Why do they want to kill me?” she asks.
The state provides trauma counseling, and the girls’ mothers have a great deal of support from family, friends and others helping them cope, Zeitchik said. The children are resilient in the way kids are, she said, “but they carry a great deal of trauma from their time in captivity that we’re still dealing with and probably will for a long time.”
David and Ariel, missing now for 737 days, will need time for healing when they return. Israeli hospitals are gearing up to receive all of the hostages once they are released. Physicians will monitor their medical condition and needs and see what complications may have arisen during their captivity.
It’s not certain how long they will be in the hospital. But when they finally come home, the family is ready to embrace them with all the love they need during their journey to recovery, Zeitchik said.
On Friday, Oct. 10, Zeitchik boarded another plane in New York and headed back to Israel.
She had scheduled the trip before the peace deal was announced, before she knew David and Ariel would be coming home. Yet she held out hope that, while there, the family would again be made whole.
“I was hoping,” she said, “the universe would give me a gift.”
Michael Collins writes about the intersection of politics and culture. A veteran reporter, he has covered the White House and Congress. Follow him on X @mcollinsNEWS.
