The father of a 9-year-old girl who has been held hostage by Hamas for the past 6 weeks believes she is facing ‘sheer terror and panic every hour of every day’.

Emily Hand had her 9th birthday as a Hamas prisoner on Friday.

At a press conference in London, with other family members of kidnapped relatives, her father Thomas Hand spoke to media about the ‘nightmare’ he was living.

“You don’t know where she is, you don’t know what suffering she’s going through. Whether she’s been fed, watered, if she has a place to go toilet even…

“Not only that but just the sheer terror of a 9-year-old girl down in those dark tunnels never seeing the light of day… She must be saying every day ‘where’s my daddy? Where’s my daddy? Why isn’t he coming to save me?’”

Hand previously was told that his daughter was killed after a group from Hamas attacked Kibbutz Be’eri, where she was having a sleepover at a friend’s house, on October 7.

At the time, Hand celebrated the news of his daughter’s death and ‘smiled’,

“Because that is the best news of the possibilities that I knew, that was the best possibility I was hoping for. That 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 was then told in late October by Israeli authorities that Emily was still alive, and his mindset shifted to getting his daughter back.

“I don’t know what condition she’s gonna be in, but she’s gonna be broken, very broken, mentally and physically, and we’ll have to fix that.

“It’s gonna take a long time to fix that. That’s what we’ve got to do, and we will do it, no matter how long it takes,” he said.

The main focus for Hand is his daughter.

“That’s my prime focus, my reason for living, for getting up in the morning every day. Because believe me, I just want to stay in bed and just… go to sleep and forget it all.

“But for Emily, I have to get up and do everything that I can to get Emily back and all the children and the babies, 38 of them.”