The father of a young Irish-Israeli girl believed to be taken hostage by Hamas broke down on CNN describing the anguish he’s experiencing, saying when he gets his daughter back safely he will “give her the world.”
Thomas Hand’s eight-year-old daughter Emily is thought to have been abducted by Hamas terrorists in the barbaric Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Hand initially believed his daughter was killed when Hamas terrorists stormed Kibbutz Be’eri and murdered more than 100 people. He was later informed his daughter was likely taken hostage alongside her friend and her friend’s mother.
Hand broke down describing his anguish over not knowing the status of his daughter’s wellbeing. (RELATED: Biden Tells Families Of Hostages In Gaza ‘We’re Coming’)
“I don’t want to imagine what she’s going through. Everyday, for, what, 38 days now. I can’t think about it. It would be too painful. She is down in the tunnels of Gaza with Hamas. I don’t want to think of what conditions she’s in. How she’s being treated, how she’s being fed. If she’s being given water and just, has she got a toothbrush and toothpaste? [And] toilet facilities. You know, these are tunnels underneath Gaza. I don’t know. Could be like the train carts in the second world war. They were just all in a cattle car.”
CNN’s Poppy Harlow then noted Hand said when he gets Emily back, he will take her to Disneyland and give her the world.
“Yeah, I’m not gonna send her to school for at least a year. We’re going to give her the world. Just happy times. And fix her. You know, she’s not going to come back – none of them are going to come back the way they went in. They are going to be mentally and physically and emotionally broken. And that’s going to take a lot of fixing. That’s going to take a lot of … time and energy to fix her. But we will do it. We will do everything we can to fix her.”
Hand gave an emotional interview to CNN when he thought Emily was among those slaughtered, saying when he found out Emily was dead, he screamed “Yes!”
“I went ‘Yes!’ and smiled because that is the best news of the possibilities that I knew. 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, that is worse than death,” he said at the time.