Grieving Father Says He Was Relieved To Learn His 8-Year-Old Daughter Killed, Not Taken To Gaza By Hamas

A grieving father told CNN that he was relieved to learn that his 8-year-old daughter had been killed by Hamas terrorists, explaining that the alternative — that she had been kidnapped and taken to Gaza — would have been exponentially worse.

Thomas Hand, who is of Irish origin, had come to Israel as a volunteer three decades earlier — and despite his initial plan to stay only a few months, he never left. After losing his wife to cancer a few years ago, he and his daughter Emily were living in Kibbutz Be’eri on their own.

When the sirens went off on Saturday, Hand said he wasn’t concerned until he heard gunshots — and when he tried to reach his daughter, who was at a friend’s home for a sleepover, he was unable to find her. He tearfully recounted the moment he learned of her death during an interview with CNN reporter Clarissa Ward.

WATCH:

In a heart-wrenching interview on @CNNsitRoom, CNN reporter Clarissa Ward speaks with @WolfBlitzer about a grieving father who finally received confirmation of his daughter's tragic death during the Hamas attack. Watch: pic.twitter.com/F9Yh3lW5KI

— CNN (@CNN) October 12, 2023

“They just said, ‘We found Emily, she’s dead,’ and I went, ‘Yes,'” Hand recalled. “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.”

Hand went on to explain that, in the aftermath of the horrific attacks Hamas terrorists had perpetrated against Israeli civilians, he knew that his daughter was either dead or in enemy hands. And given what he knew about the way Hamas has treated captives in the past, he said that he could only hope that she was dead so that she would not have to endure 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, that is worse than death,” he said. “The way they treat you, they have no food, they have no water.”

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“She’d be in a dark room with Christ-who-knows how many people and terrified every minute, hour, day and possible years to come. So death was a blessing, an absolute blessing,” he concluded.