'Shadows of children': Freed Hamas child hostages still speak in whispers, say families

Children held hostage by Hamas spent seven weeks in tunnels in Gaza before most of them were freed during the seven-day truce to allow for hostage-for-detainee swaps in the run-up to December 1.

But the impact of their time in captivity is ongoing, and there is no way of knowing how long it will last, medical experts have said.

Thomas Hand said his nine-year-old daughter Emily only spoke in whispers after she was freed. She had been abducted and held hostage by Hamas militants for 50 days.

"I had to put my ear on her lips and say, 'What did you say?'" Mr Hand told CNN.

Emily had been conditioned to not make any noise, he added.

"She’s coming out slowly, little by little," he said. "We’ll only know what she really went through as she opens up."

Relatives of other released hostages have given similar accounts of the lingering effects captivity has had on their family members.

“You can definitely see what they went through,” Yuval Haran said after his two nieces, their mother and grandmother were released by Hamas. The girls’ father remains a captive.

“We’re trying to give them love, to give them hugs, to give them control back of their life,” Mr Haran said.

“I think that’s the most important thing, to give them the sense that they can decide now.”

Dr. Efrat Bron-Harlev of Schneider Children’s Medical Centre in suburban Tel Aviv, who helped treat more than two dozen former captives, said the young people released "looked like shadows of children".

Some of the children behaved differently with their food after being released, Dr. Bron-Harlev said, having not known if or when food would arrive.

One child was reluctant to eat after being freed, and when they were asked why, they whispered: "Because we have to keep it for later.”

Other children said they had been unable to wash while they were held in Gaza, with one group saying they were allowed to bathe just three times with buckets of cold water over the course of seven weeks.

Hamas released 105 people during the temporary ceasefire.

A total of 240 Palestinian detainees were released by Israel under the agreement.

Israeli airstrikes are estimated to have killed at least 5,000 children in Gaza, with more than 4,500 reported dead and around 1,500 missing or presumed dead.

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