Regaining control: A nine-year-old Hamas hostage’s road to recovery

In the queue for a drink at Aroma Cafe in the desert town of Arad, Emily Hand began to shiver.

“What’s the matter?” asked her father, Thomas, who has been caring for nine-year-old Emily since she was freed from Hamas captivity.

She did not reply but simply looked over her shoulder.

Behind her were customers dressed in traditional Arab clothing, speaking Arabic.

“In her eyes, they looked and sounded like some of the terrorists who had abducted her,” Mr Hand said. Her face was frozen with fear.

In a sudden rush, he escorted his daughter out to the car and they drove quickly down the winding desert road towards their Dead Sea refuge.

More than five months after her captivity inside Gaza ended, Emily is not yet the fully contented child she had been in Kibbutz Be’eri, one of the worst-hit communities in the Oct 7 terror attacks.

She had been living blissfully in what Mr Hand, born in Ireland, calls a “paradise”, surrounded by friends and caring adults, enjoying gymnastics, Brazilian dance, judo, volleyball, tennis and piano, and lavishing love on her dog, her horse and her collection of snails.

Upon her release, she would only whisper. But she has made progress on the long road to recovery, she and her father revealed in a series of interviews with The Telegraph.

In part through learning to ride a horse, she has regained some sense of control of her life. Her shattered confidence has been bolstered by occasional bursts of joy such as a recent fun-filled visit to Disneyland.

This week, she and her father mustered the courage to return to their kibbutz – eight months or more after thousands of Hamas gunmen and rabble broke through the fence into Israel.

Be’eri is still eerily empty, with many burnt-out and bullet-shattered homes and children’s toys lying in destroyed heaps.

There, Emily stood in front of the burnt-out home where she had been on an overnight sleepover with her best friend Hila and Hila’s mother, Raaya Rotem, who were released along with Emily in November 2023.

“Bring Them Home” posters showing her face and those of Hila and Hila’s mother, are still plastered on the front wall of a burnt-out hulk. Throughout the visit, Emily hardly spoke. “I had absolute paradise for thirty years and then hell on earth in one day,” said Mr Hand.

Marched to the perimeter of the kibbutz at gunpoint, Emily had seen several residents including children either dead by the wayside or also being kidnapped. Then, the abducted trio were taken into Gaza, slung in the back of a vehicle and virtually crushed under other captives and jubilant gunmen.

From her kibbutz alone, over 100 were murdered and 28 people were abducted. Scores of the survivors remain in captivity after eight months.

When Emily got back to Israel in late November she had to face further grim news. She was told while recovering in hospital that her beloved stepmother, Narkis, Mr Hand’s ex-wife, had been murdered in her own home on the same kibbutz.

After eight months of recovery, incidents like that in the cafe are becoming increasingly rare. Her recurring dreams of escaping from her captors and arriving back at her kibbutz home have receded.

But there remains a long way to go.

Because of Emily’s sudden fame, Mr Hand felt they needed somewhere private to recuperate and moved to the secluded home of one of his two older children in Herzliya, on the Mediterranean coast.

At first, she refused to go outside.

Within weeks Emily, accompanied by her father, her half-sister and of course by Johnsie the dog, would stroll on the nearby beach. Even there, people would run up to her and call out: “Emily we love you.” Emily would express complete surprise that people knew who she was.

She developed a reticence to meet strangers and refused to go to school in her unfamiliar environment. Several weeks ago, Mr Hand decided to take her to live with him on a small remote kibbutz where some of the refugee children from Be’eri were now staying. She has gone back to school and, now that she is with classmates who she knows from before Oct 7, Emily feels much more able to cope.

In parallel, Mr Hand has been driving her each weekend to venues north of Tel Aviv in a bid to help her gradually reintegrate and regain confidence. She has been attending programmes designed by a psychologist provided by the Israeli government.

During her captivity she had been buffeted by a loss of any power over her fate, her psychologist has explained. So the activities Emily is undertaking are designed to gradually allow her to feel she is regaining control.

However, considerable amounts of her trauma are still to be overcome.

When she borrowed her father’s phone on the journey inside Israel to a Tel Aviv hospital she rapidly found a Beyonce track to watch – but turned the volume to near-zero. When Mr Hand raised the volume Emily panicked and turned it down again.

At first, she revealed very little about what had happened inside Gaza.

Bit by bit, she told her father part of the story. She had not even been allowed to go to the rudimentary toilet without permission, and the door had to be left open with one of the armed guards staring at her as she had to crouch on the floor, she told her father.

It emerged that Emily’s captors had brandished a large knife and told her they would slit her throat if she misbehaved or even raised her voice beyond a whisper.

When she was freed her voice was so soft that Mr Hand had to put his ear right up against her lips to hear what she was saying. Later she indicated, indirectly, that she saw a female adult hostage being abused.

‘The box’

For months after her liberation, Emily insisted on her father standing outside the door when she went to the loo. So as not to be alone at night, Emily insisted too that she slept in a bed alongside her father – though she now has accepted to sleep in a separate bed positioned a few inches from his.

She still refuses to mention the word Gaza, referring to it instead in Hebrew as “The Box”, and has another code word, “Olives”, for her captors.

“I never want to say the real words for those things and those people ever again,” said Emily, as she stroked her father’s arm.

Emily had become gaunt during her captivity but has now put on the weight she lost and regained her strength. She enjoys swimming in the kibbutz pool, skating around on pink rollerblades, and eating vast quantities of her favourite food, sushi.

Mr Hand believes Emily’s previous setbacks in life have served to bolster her psychological strength. When she was two, Emily’s mother, Liat, died of cancer, and within a year and a half, so too had Emily’s grandfather and her favourite aunt.

Her progress took a leap forward under her psychologist’s guidance two months ago when she was given the opportunity to ride a pony-sized horse. That meant she was at last in charge of a living creature, not the other way around. She also began singing and acting classes, and her father is teaching her to fish from a boat.

The biggest breakthrough came a few weeks ago when Emily and around 100 other former hostages or survivors were sponsored by American benefactors to have a fun holiday – including several days in Disneyland in Florida. “Emily showed she has no fear of physical dangers any more,” says her admiring father. “And after what she endured in Gaza, it’s no surprise. She was game to try and enjoy even the most terrifying roller coaster rides.”

Last day in capitivity

Since she returned from America, her father has been delighted that Emily is no longer whispering when under stress, albeit she is speaking at a lower volume than she did before her ordeal. She is gradually telling her father new bits and pieces of what happened inside Gaza.

Emily said the most terrifying day was her last day in captivity.

First, Hila’s mother, who had been Emily’s main anchor in captivity, was taken away, and Emily and Hila feared she was to be executed. Then, as they were later led out, faces covered and without any explanation, the two children wondered if they were about to die. Or, Emily also feared, was this a prelude to the kidnappers killing the two remaining adult hostages held with her?

They were Itay Svirsky and Noa Argamani, the 26-year-old Israeli who in January this year was forced to appear on Hamas propaganda videos, presented in game-show style, and had to announce the deaths of two fellow hostages.

Svirsky’s dead body was shown in that gruesome Hamas video. Fortunately, said Mr Hand, Emily was told about it but she did not believe the report, since she had seen via social media that Hamas “lie and lie and lie”.

Ms Argamani was one of four Israelis rescued last week in the dramatic Israeli raid into the Hamas-held Nuseirat camp. Emily and her father burst into tears of joy on hearing the news, and he said she is very keen, when the time is right, to visit Ms Argamani, hug her and “help her recover”.

It’s not just Emily who has needed to recover. Her father, chain-smoking and losing weight rapidly, endured the anguish of not knowing his daughter’s fate for seven weeks – his mind and spirit wracked with guilt for having failed to protect her from her captors.

Incorrectly told, days after her abduction, that his daughter was dead, he had shocked television reporters when he responded: “Thank God. This means my girl will not be abused by those terrorists, and I can begin to grieve.”

Israeli intelligence later concluded she was still alive. Mr Hand travelled to the US, Britain and continental Europe indefatigably to describe his daughter’s plight in deeply emotional and heart-rending speeches. He had hoped that a publicity campaign would put pressure on the Irish government to intervene with Hamas.

In what became the last two days of Emily’s captivity, as he waited for news of whether his daughter would be brought home in a fragile hostages-for-prisoners deal, he kept repeating: “Anything can go wrong at any time.”

Just then, news of Emily’s impending release came through by phone, but he was ordered by the army not to reveal anything. The next afternoon Mr Hand, and Johnsie the dog, clambered into a military vehicle heading to the border.

Mr Hand said he was afraid his daughter would be furious with him for “not saving her”, either during the kibbutz attack or while she was in Gaza – yet he was sure she would be able to show unadulterated love for her pet. In fact, Mr Hand now says: “Thankfully, my analysis was wrong. She was not blaming me at all.”

As they reunited, Emily hugged him first, not the dog, then stared at him for minutes. “I thought you were dead,” she finally told her father. Having seen dead people on her kibbutz as she was being abducted, she had believed that he – and indeed all the people on her kibbutz – must either have also been kidnapped or killed.

The Dublin-born Irishman – who lived in England from the age of nine till he was 32 – has been careful not to let Emily see images and reports of the war as it unfolds on television, but he admits he cannot stop her accessing upsetting videos on social media.

Emily mainly uses a mobile phone and computer, though, for another purpose: to binge-watch her favourite singer, Beyoncé. She dreams of attending one of Beyoncé‘s concerts – an ambition Mr Hand said he is determined to make happen no matter the cost of the tickets and flights.

Apart from this interview and the photos he has provided, Mr Hand wants Emily now to disappear from public view – on the strict instructions of his children and the advice of the child’s psychologist.

“I want her to become unrecognisable as she changes her appearance and enters puberty,” he tells me.

He confides that he still worries some event will “trigger” a return to Emily’s rapidly receding turmoil. But the signs are very encouraging. For one thing, her father no longer sees her crunching up her face or contorting her body as she sleeps. She also no longer has nightmares.

“Now, at last, she’s happier. She’s sleeping well, and so am I,” he said. “I’m starting to feel that the nightmare for her and me that started on October the 7th is really ending.”