A 9-year-old girl snatched up by Hamas gunmen on Oct. 7 and held captive for weeks in Gaza told her father upon her release that she believed she’d been there for “a year.”
“Apart from the whispering, that was a punch in the guts. A year,” her father, Thomas Hand, told CNN on Tuesday, describing how young Emily returned from captivity speaking only in a whisper. She referred to the place she had been held as “the box,” he said.
“The most shocking, disturbing part of meeting her was she was just whispering, you couldn’t hear her. I had to put my ear on her lips,” Hand said of their reunion after her release last Saturday. “She’d been conditioned not to make any noise.”
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Just eight weeks earlier, Emily had gone over to a friend’s house for a sleepover that no one could have ever imagined would’ve turned into a bloody hostage situation as Emily and her pal Hila were taken by force by Hamas gunmen, along with Hila’s mother, Raaya, who remains in captivity.
Thomas Hand had made headlines early on in the Israel-Hamas war for announcing that Emily had been killed—and expressing relief that she didn’t have to suffer.
“That was the best possibility that I was hoping for. She was either dead or in Gaza. And if you know anything about what they do to people in Gaza, that is worse than death,” Hand said at the time.
Just days before he received word of his daughter’s impending release this month, he broke down at a heartbreaking press conference where he imagined the “sheer terror” that Emily was living through, saying, “She must be saying every day, ‘Where’s my daddy? Where is my daddy? Why isn’t he coming to save me?’”
Now that she has returned home, he said, he can see the toll that the experience took on her—leaving her face “chiseled,” her body thin, and giving her a look of “glassy-eyed terror.”
“Last night she cried until her face was red and blotchy, she couldn’t stop. She didn’t want any comfort, I guess she’s forgotten how to be comforted,” Hand told CNN. “She went under the covers of the bed, the quilt, covered herself up and quietly cried.”
But she’s also shown plenty of signs that her spirit will prevail, he said: “The first thing she did was get a Beyoncé song on.”
