Nine-year-old freed hostage Emily Hand still struggles to talk about her time in Hamas captivity more than two months later, often using code words to feel more comfortable addressing it, according to her father.

Thomas Hand, Emily’s father, said in a new interview with the Israeli network Kan that his daughter does not say much about her harrowing ordeal.

“Just every now and then, [she gives] little snippets of information,” the parent said. “But we’re not actually even allowed to question her in any way, from the psychiatrists’ point of view. They said, ‘No, whatever she wants to say voluntarily, let it come out.'”

When Emily does talk about what she’d gone through, she uses the names of foods or things she does not like as code words.

Turning to Emily, he asked: “What’s Zeitim? (Hebrew for olives)?”

“Terrorists,” the girl replied.

“Any food or item that she doesn’t like, she transfers that word into code,” the dad explained.

Asked why she has devised this code system, the Israeli-Irish girl, who was just 8 years old when she was kidnapped from a kibbutz during the Oct. 7 attack, replied: “Sometimes it is uncomfortable for me to say these words.”

The father said that from the time Emily was taken until her release in a prisoner exchange in November, she was whisked by her captors — most of them men — from house to house in Gaza, “presumably taking one step ahead of the IDF,” he said.

Emily said that in captivity — which she calls “the box” — none of the terrorists were ever nice to her.

At one point, her dad said that a Hamas goon threatened his child, telling her: “Uskut” (Arabic for be quiet) or I’ll kill you with this knife.”

Thomas Hand said his daughter is “making progress” and recovering from her trauma, but he noted that she has returned from Gaza “a bit more mature,” but at the same time “insecure.”

“She always wants to know that the door is locked, that the shutters are down,” the dad said. “She wants to feel secure in the house.”

Hand made international headlines when, thinking that his child had been killed by terrorists during the deadly assault on Kibbutz Be’eri, he told reporters that his daughter dying “was the best possibility.”