Ex-hostage reveals she tried to kill herself in Gaza, says seeing footage of protests saved her
Former hostage Arbel Yehoud reveals that she attempted to end her life several times while held captive by Palestinian terrorists in Gaza, but decided not to after seeing a poster with her picture when shown images of a protest in Israel.
“One of the times, not long before my release, I saw drone footage from Hostages Square [in Tel Aviv]. I saw people holding signs of people I don’t know, and then suddenly I saw signs of people I know. I saw a sign for Ariel [Cunio] and a sign for me, signs of people from the kibbutz,” Yehoud tells Channel 12 news in an interview aired Friday evening.
“From the moment I saw that, I didn’t try to put an end to my own life there,” she continues. “That was the last time I tried. When I saw the drone footage and understood that people who I don’t know are fighting for me as if I am their sister or daughter, I have the duty to return to Ariel and my family, but also to those fighting for me.”
Cunio and Yehoud, self-described “high school sweethearts,” were kidnapped together from their home at Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, 2023, and then held separately in the Gaza Strip. Yehoud was released from captivity during a truce in January 2025, while Cunio was returned to Gaza as part of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal reached in October.
“I told her, ‘the most important thing is that we stay together. As long as they don’t separate us, we’ll be okay.’ Half-an-hour later, that is what happened,” Cunio says when recalling their abduction. “It happened so fast, there wasn’t even time to say ‘I love you, be strong.’”
“I didn’t manage to tell him bye, I didn’t get to see his eyes,” Yehoud adds.
Released hostage Ariel Cunio and former hostage Arbel Yehoud reunited on October 13, 2025 (Courtesy Hostages Forum)
Cunio says that after pressing his captors for information on Yehoud, they told him to write a letter, which they ended up passing along to her, leading to a period of few months in which they were able to correspond.
“It was a lot of writing about the love between us, what was going on with us each day, our conditions, trying to get some sort of picture of what is going on outside,” he says in the interview. “She wrote to me in the last letter that she heard there was a massacre at Nir Oz and that we need to stay strong about what we will discover when we get out, because you don’t know anything. You don’t know if your family is living, who is dead, who was kidnapped.”
In the interview, Yehoud says she had tried to push away her experiences in captivity, though that changed when former hostage Romi Gonen revealed in a recent interview that she was repeatedly sexually assaulted by terrorists before being transferred underground with other captives.
“I really identified with what she said, in terms of the gap she feels when she met with the other girls in the tunnel,” Yehoud tells Channel 12. “But even after I saw the horrors that Romi needed to endure, the gap remains. Because it was a very long time, and the things I went through, I went through from beginning to end, so they are in a sealed box.”