The father of a nine-year-old girl held hostage by Hamas for six weeks says he is terrified his daughter is suffering “pure terror” in the airless Gaza tunnels.
Emily Hand turned nine years old as a Hamas prisoner on Friday, exactly six weeks after the terror group launched a surprise incursion into Israel and slaughtered 1,200 people, mostly civilians.
Her father, Irish-born Thomas Hand, previously believed she had died after a unit of Hamas terrorists killed more than 130 people on October 7 at Kibbutz Be’eri, where she was staying at a sleepover at her friend’s house.
He previously said he was happy to hear she was dead because he was terrified of how she might be treated by Hamas.
Today, Hand said at a press conference in London that he believed she faced “pure terror and panic” every hour of the day.
‘Every day she has to say: “Where is my father? Where is my father, why doesn’t he come and save me?”
“She probably says every day, ‘Where is my father? Where is my father, why doesn’t he come and save me?'” said Thomas Hand (photo)
Hand (left today), who was told by Israeli authorities late last month that Emily (right) was in fact alive, said he worried about the mental and physical toll being a hostage would take on his young daughter.
Thomas Hand was joined at the Israeli embassy in London by a series of other relatives of Hamas kidnapping victims
He told reporters at the news conference, where relatives of kidnapped relatives pleaded for the safe return of their loved ones: “That’s what I’m going through, that’s what we’re all going through. A nightmare, an absolute nightmare.’
Hand, who was told late last month by Israeli authorities that Emily was in fact alive, said he worried about the mental and physical toll that holding his young daughter hostage would take.
“I don’t know what condition she will be in, but she will be broken, very broken, mentally and physically, and we will have to fix that,” he said.
‘It will take a long time to solve that. That’s what we have to do, and we will do it no matter how long it takes.”
“That’s my main focus, my reason for being, to get up every day.
‘Because believe me, I just want to stay in bed and just… go to sleep and forget everything.
“But for Emily, I have to stand up and do everything I can to get Emily back, and all the children and babies, 38 of them.”
Her father, Irish-born Thomas Hand, said he was glad to hear she was dead because he was terrified of how she might have been treated by Hamas terrorists.
Pictured: Emily Hand. The nine-year-old girl had spent the night with a friend on Friday, her father Thomas said. While the kibbutz was under siege, he did not know the fate or whereabouts of his little girl for twelve hours
Irish-born Thomas Hand with his daughters Emily and Natalie (photo, right)(
Israeli officials told the Hand family that Emily was likely somewhere in the besieged Gaza Strip after believing she was dead for more than a month.
Israeli officials told the Hand family that Emily was likely somewhere in the besieged Gaza Strip after believing she was dead for more than a month.
Her older sister, Natalie, told Israeli media: “We were told she had been murdered. We were in mourning.
“On October 31, they told us there was a good chance she had been kidnapped.”
When Natalie was asked if she had anything she wanted to say to Emily, if only she could listen, she said, “I want to tell you that we are doing everything we can to get you home. We know you’re being held hostage.
“We love and miss you so much.”
Thomas, who was born in the coastal town of Dún Laoghaire in the Republic of Ireland, said in an interview with CNN just days after Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel: ‘(Israeli authorities) said, ‘We found Emily. She’s dead.’ and I just said “Yes!” I said “yes”, and I smiled, because that is the best news about the possibilities I knew.
‘She was either dead or in Gaza. And if you know anything about what they are doing to people in Gaza, it is worse than death,” he said.
“They wouldn’t have any food. They would have no water. She would be in a dark room, filled with Christ knows how many people, terrified every minute, hour, day and possible years. So death was a blessing. An absolute blessing.’
The press conference with the hostages’ families comes just days after Israeli forces revealed they had found the bodies of two hostages near a tunnel shaft in Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital that they believe was used by Hamas .
Hamas’ tunnel infrastructure has been exposed around the AI-Shifa hospital in Gaza
The IDF revealed evidence of weapons that it said made the hospital a terrorist base
IDF forces belonging to the Shaldag Unit, the 7th Brigade and additional special forces continue to conduct targeted activities at Shifa Hospital.
The IDF has released a video it says shows a tunnel entrance in an outside area of Al-Shifa Hospital, two days after Israeli forces entered the site to hunt for a Hamas command center it says is under medical facility.
During the raid, Israëls said his forces found the bodies of two hostages – Yehudit Weiss, 64, and Israeli soldier Noa Marciano, 19 – in a building next to the hospital.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed there was “strong evidence” that hostages were being held at the hospital, but that they were no longer there when the hospital was raided.
“We had strong indications that they were being held in Shifa Hospital, which is one of the reasons we entered the hospital,” he told CBS Evening News. “If they were there, they were taken out.”
The Hamas-led Ministry of Health in Gaza today claimed that a shell struck the second floor of the Indonesian hospital, killing at least twelve people and a medical worker, as part of the IDF’s efforts to provide medical to clear facilities in Gaza that it claims are used by Hamas. as cover.
Heavy fighting broke out around the Indonesian hospital, which has housed thousands of patients and displaced people for weeks.
The fighting came a day after the World Health Organization evacuated 31 premature babies from Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital, the enclave’s largest, where they were among more than 250 seriously ill or injured patients stranded there for days after Israeli forces invaded the complex.
Israel says Hamas is using civilians and hospitals as shields, while critics say Israel’s siege and brutal aerial bombardment amount to collective punishment of the 2.3 million Palestinians in the area after Hamas’s Oct. 7 incursion into southern Israel.
According to Palestinian health authorities, which do not distinguish between civilian and militant deaths, more than 11,500 Palestinians, two-thirds of them women and children, have been killed since the war began, while about 2,700 people are reported missing.
About 1,200 people were killed in Israel, mainly in the October 7 attack, and about 240 were captured by militants.