OAN’s Sophia Flores
3:24 PM – Friday, December 29, 2023
Freed Israeli hostage Mia Schem has described the emotional and physical torture she endured at the hands of her Islamic terrorist captors while in captivity for 54 days.
Several clips circulating on social media on Thursday previewed her full joint-interview with Channel 12 and Channel 13 news. She expressed that it was important to share her story with the world.
“It’s important to me to reveal the real situation about the people who live in Gaza, who they really are, and what I went through there,” she said. “I experienced hell. Everyone there are terrorists… there are no innocent civilians, not one,” she said. “[Innocent civilians] don’t exist.”
The 21-year old was kidnapped from the Nova music festival on October 7th.
Schem recounted how, when rockets started soaring in the early morning, she and her friend tried to flee the area in a car. However, the vehicle’s tires were eventually shot and punctured by Hamas members.
Then, Schem said that she was shot in the arm at close range by the terrorists driving into the festival.
She reportedly attempted to “play dead” as Hamas members were shooting all of the wounded individuals around her. After a few minutes passed, Schem noticed a man walking towards her and she assumed that he was an Israeli soldier coming to save her.
The frightened girl then yelled out, “help!”
However, the man walking towards her ended up being a member of Hamas as opposed to an IDF soldier.
He “started to touch me, in the upper part of my body,” gesturing toward her chest. “And I started to scream, to go crazy, amid the burning cars, the bodies,” she said. Once the terrorist saw her bloody arm, he “recoiled, and stopped for a moment.”
Schem was then abruptly pulled by her hair, thrown inside a vehicle, and taken to Gaza.
“And then out of nowhere somebody grabbed me by my hair pulled me into a car and drove me to Gaza,” she recalled.
When she arrived in Gaza, Schem was reportedly operated on for “three hours by a veterinarian without anesthesia.”
“They pulled me by my hair from the car, they threw me in some back room of some hospital,” Schem said. (They) “stretched out my arm, tied it up on a piece of plastic, and that’s how I was for three days.”
While she did not see the face of the individual operating on her, the 21-year old recalled one male operator looking at her and saying, “you’re not going home alive.”
After the surgery, she revealed that she was bought to a family’s home and was held there. The entire family reportedly had ties to the terrorist organization.
“These are families under Hamas. In retrospect, I suddenly realized that I was with a family,” she said in the interview. “Suddenly, I started asking myself questions. Why am I in a family’s house? Why are there children here? Why is there a woman here?”
In another portion of the interview, Schem went into greater detail pertaining to how Hamas starved her and treated her “like an animal in a zoo.” The husband living in the home would also not take his eyes off of Schem for the entirety of her stay.
She described the captor as a “terrorist raping her with his eyes.”
She believes that the reason she was not physically raped by him was because “his wife and children were in the next room. His wife hated the fact that he was alone in the room with me. Hated it. So she would play games with me.”
His wife would not bring her food for days “out of jealousy.”
“A day, two days, three days, I wouldn’t eat… she was so terrible, she had mean eyes. She was a very evil woman,” she said.
Schem knew that the only chance she had to stay alive would be by faking her emotions towards her captors. One story that she recalled during the interview described a situation when the husband was crying and extremely upset that two of his friends had been killed in Israeli airstrikes.
“I was very satisfied” by the news of his friends’ deaths, Schem said, “but I acted sad, I comforted him, I played the game.”
During her last few days, Schem was moved from home to home, cooking and cleaning for different terrorists.
Five days before she was released, Schem was taken down to the underground tunnels. This was the first time that she came in contact with other hostages taken from Israel.
She described the underground Hamas tunnels as an environment with “no air, no food, [and] with an open wound.” The French-Israeli citizen also said that the environment was “difficult,” as many of the hostages had lost hope in returning home.
Schem did not believe that she was being released until her captors told her that it was time to go. She described her emotions while leaving the other hostages behind as “the hardest thing in the world.”
“They said to me, ‘Mia, please, make sure they don’t forget us.’ And I apologized that I was leaving,” she said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Since returning home, she has vowed to be a voice for those who are still being held against their will.
After her rescue, Schem even got a new tattoo that reads: “I will never forget the 7.10.23.”
In her Instagram post unveiling the tattoo, she captioned it, “The pain and fear, the hard scenes, the friends who won’t come back and the ones we have to bring back. But we will still win, We will still dance!”
It is believed that over 130 hostages from Israel still remain in Gaza.
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