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Mia Schem had been held hostage in Gaza for 3 days when, she mentioned, she underwent surgical procedure for a gunshot wound she sustained in Hamas’s assault on Israel. For days afterward — compelled to share a room along with her captor — she obtained no painkillers and needed to exchange her personal bandages.
The account by Ms. Schem, who has talked about her 55 days in captivity with two tv stations and in a photograph essay revealed within the newspaper Yediot Ahronot, has touched a selected nerve in Israel.
It echoes these of different hostages: an absence of meals and water and minimal entry to medical care. However her interviews and written account, which couldn’t be independently confirmed, have supplied essentially the most detailed have a look at what life was like in captivity. Her household didn’t conform to an interview with The New York Occasions.
Ms. Schem, a 21-year-old Israeli French citizen from Shoham, Israel, was kidnapped by Hamas after fleeing the Nova music pageant through the Oct. 7 terrorist assault that killed about 1,200 folks in southern Israel. Early within the conflict, the group launched a video of her in captivity, the primary on any of the greater than 230 hostages.
In her recollections since her launch, Ms. Schem has described being held in a household’s dwelling in Gaza in a room along with her captor, and together with his spouse and youngsters within the adjoining room. Her solely time alone was within the rest room, the place she would sometimes stick her tattooed fingers out of the window within the hopes of being acknowledged, she wrote in Yediot Ahronot.
In the future, as Ms. Schem struggled with a knot in her hair, her captor approached with scissors, she wrote. She screamed at him, telling him she would type it out herself, which ended up taking her nearly two weeks due to her injured arm, she mentioned.
Ms. Schem instructed Israeli tv that some days, her captor’s spouse “would carry him meals,” with out bringing any for Ms. Schem.
“There have been days when she wouldn’t let me eat,” Ms. Schem mentioned.
She instructed Israeli tv that at one level her captor known as her over to observe footage on tv of her mom talking at a information convention, saying he did so “to harm me,” however that she nonetheless drew power from seeing her mom.
One other day, her captor was upset after his mates had been killed in an Israeli bombing, she mentioned, including that she consoled him solely so as “to play the sport.” Different instances, the bombing was shut by.
“The home windows broke within the dwelling I used to be in,” she mentioned.
In the previous couple of days earlier than her launch, Ms. Schem mentioned, she was taken to tunnels practically 200 toes under the bottom the place it was arduous to breathe.
In her hostage video launched by Hamas, Ms. Schem pleaded to go dwelling and described present process surgical procedure. She instructed Israeli tv that she had been instructed to say that she was being cared for.
“You do what you’re instructed,” she mentioned in describing the video. “You’re afraid to die.”
Ms. Schem was finally launched in late November throughout a quick truce between Israel and Hamas. Since then, she mentioned, she has undergone extra surgical procedures as a result of her bone had been closely broken when she was shot.
Now at dwelling, she has struggled to deal with her expertise in Gaza and with leaving different hostages behind.
“I can’t get it out of my head,” she instructed Israeli tv.
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