9-Year-Old Freed From Hamas Thought She’d Been Captive a Year

A 9-year-old girl snatched up by Hamas gunmen on Oct. 7 and held captive for weeks in Gaza told her father upon her release that she believed she’d been there for “a year.”

“Apart from the whispering, that was a punch in the guts. A year,” her father, Thomas Hand, told CNN on Tuesday, describing how young Emily returned from captivity speaking only in a whisper. She referred to the place she had been held as “the box,” he said.

“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,” Hand said of their reunion after her release last Saturday. “She’d been conditioned not to make any noise.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.