Thomas's anguish was palpable as he described the moment he reunited with his daughter after her release.
"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," disclosed Thomas Hand, the father of 9-year-old Emily Hand, one of the hostages, told CNN. "She’d been conditioned not to make any noise."
According to Hand on CNN, Emily told him she thought he had been taken hostage too. When he asked her how long she thought she was gone, Emily replied “A year.” He told CNN, “Apart from the whispering, that was a punch in the guts. A year,"
Thomas originally thought Emily was killed
Thomas rose to international prominence when, several days after the Hamas massacres on October 7, he told CNN that he was relieved to hear the news that his daughter had been killed, because the alternative, that his daughter was a Hamas hostage, would be far worse.
“They just said, ‘We found Emily, she’s dead,’ and I went, ‘Yes,'” Hand told CNN. “I went ‘Yes,’ and smiled because that is the best news of the possibilities that I knew."
Later, he mentioned that the IDF believes there is a "high possibility" that Emily is being held hostage by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Thomas had previously expressed his initial fears that his daughter was held captive in the terrorist-controlled Palestinian enclave saying, “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 – that is worse than death.”
Emily had been staying with a friend in Kibbutz Be’eri, one of the southern Israeli communities hit hardest by Hamas’s terrorist infiltration on October 7.
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