Disclaimer: This story contains references to kidnapping, captivity, violence and alleged sexual assault that some readers may find distressing. The claims are based on public statements, interviews, and available information to the investigating network The Independent in London. Allegations have not been independently verified by The Sunday Guardian.
Nearly three years after Palestinian Hamas militants shot her in the arm and dragged her across the border into Gaza, Mia Schem has spoken publicly again about the 54 days she spent in captivity, describing a point-blank shooting, weeks held inside a Palestinian family’s home, and the fragile hope that carried her through fifty-five days of fear, the testimony drawn out in detail through The Independent’s investigative interview with the survivor.
Mia Schem was 21 years old and training to be a tattoo artist when she went to the Nova music festival near the Israeli community of Re’im on October 7, 2023. Within hours, the desert gathering had become the site of one of the deadliest single attacks of the war, as Hamas-led gunmen stormed the festival grounds, killing hundreds of attendees and abducting dozens more into Gaza.
Schem was one of them. Nearly three years later, in an extended sit-down account given to The Independent’s Caspar Barnes as part of the paper’s ongoing investigative coverage of October 7 survivors, she has laid out in granular detail not only the moment she was shot but the quiet, grinding fear of the weeks that followed inside Gaza, a period during which, she has said, she made a private vow never to give up.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas militants led a large-scale, multi-front attack against Israel, resulting in significant casualties and the abduction of hostages. The event marked a major escalation in the conflict and triggered a wide-reaching military response. Credit: X
Hamas’ Oct 7 Rampage into Israel & The Moment Everything Changed
As the attack unfolded around 7:17 a.m., Schem and her friend Elia Toledano attempted to flee the festival by car, but their tyres were shot out by the approaching Hamas militants. In the chaos, Schem sent a message to a friend that would later come to define the horror of that morning: “They are shooting at us, please come save us.”
She and Toledano abandoned the burning vehicle and tried to escape on foot, but Schem was shot in the arm at point-blank range by a Hamas. She has described the injury as leaving her arm nearly detached from the force of the shot, and has recalled trying to play dead in the immediate aftermath before being forced to move when a fire began spreading toward where she lay. It was in that moment of movement, wounded and exposed, that a militant approached and she was seized.
Toledano was abducted alongside her that same morning; his body was recovered by Israeli forces during a military operation in December 2023, closing one small, grim chapter of a story that, for Schem, was only just beginning.
The Israeli military has since said it identified the specific Hamas operative responsible for her abduction from the Mefalsim area, a paramedic in the group’s military medical services who was killed in a later Gaza airstrike. That confirmation, delivered by the Israel Defence Forces roughly a year and a half after the attack, offered Schem one of the few concrete pieces of closure available to a survivor whose captivity was, for weeks, defined by uncertainty about who held her and why.
Hamas took Mia Schem hostage from the Nova music festival on October 7th. Source: Embassy of Israel to the USA
In Gaza, After Kidnapping, Held Inside A Family’s Home
Once in Gaza, Schem has said she was held for much of her captivity inside the home of a Palestinian family, a detail she has returned to repeatedly in interviews as one of the more disorienting aspects of her ordeal. “I began asking myself questions: why am I in a family home? Why are there children here? Why is there a woman here?” Schem recalled to Israel’s Channel 13, describing her confusion at discovering that ordinary domestic life, a wife, children, the rhythms of a household- was continuing just steps from the room where she was being held captive.
It was an intimacy of proximity that she has described as its own particular form of psychological disorientation: not the anonymous brutality of a prison cell, but captivity nested inside someone else’s family life, with all the strange normalcy that implied.
Her only moments of solitude, she has said, came during trips to the bathroom, where she would sometimes press her tattooed fingers against the window in the hope that someone outside might recognise her and realise she was alive. It was a small, desperate gesture of visibility from someone who, for weeks, existed almost entirely outside the knowledge of the people searching for her.
Shlomi Ziv (40) was kidnapped by Hamas on October 7 at the Nova festival. Shlomi was working as security director at the festival when he was brutally taken hostage for 245 days. Source: Israel Defence Forces
Small, almost mundane details from that period have stayed with her since. In one account published in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, Schem described her captor approaching her with scissors one day after she struggled with a stubborn knot in her hair; she screamed at him and insisted on untangling it herself, a task that ultimately took her nearly two weeks to complete because of her wounded and largely immobile arm.
It is the kind of detail that captures something larger about captivity narratives more broadly, the way ordinary indignities and small assertions of control take on outsized significance when almost everything else has been stripped away.
The Gaza Tunnels, And A Promise Made In The Dark
Later in her captivity, Schem was moved from the family home into a tunnel system beneath Gaza, where she was held alongside five other women hostages in the days before her eventual release. It was there, in the dark and cramped confines of the tunnel, that she has said she made the promise that would come to define much of her public life after her release: that if she made it home, she would make what she called a huge “balagan,” a great ruckus, on behalf of the women left behind.
According to accounts published by Yeshiva University following one of her US speaking appearances, Schem was given just ten minutes to prepare to leave once the negotiated truce that would free her was finalised, a jarringly abrupt transition after fifty-four days of captivity spent almost entirely without any sense of when, or whether, release might come.
Schem was released on November 30, 2023, as part of a temporary weeklong truce between Israel and Hamas that saw 105 hostages freed in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli custody.
She was handed over to the International Committee of the Red Cross alongside Amit Soussana, a 40-year-old lawyer who had also been held hostage, in scenes broadcast around the world. Her mother, Keren, had spent the preceding weeks in a state of open anguish; footage from the family broadcast on Israeli media showed her weeping with joy at news of her daughter’s release, exclaiming simply, “Mia’s coming back!” Her father, David, told Israel’s Channel 12 at the time that it was “the happiest day in the world,” adding, “she’s an amazing girl. I’m not going to leave her for a long period.”
French President Emmanuel Macron, whose government had taken a close interest in Schem’s case owing to her dual French-Israeli citizenship, described her release as a source of “great joy” for both nations.
A Painful, Public Reckoning
The years since Schem’s release have been defined less by quiet recovery than by a deliberate, sustained public campaign. Her family has said she has since developed epilepsy, which they attribute to the trauma and prolonged sleep deprivation she endured during her captivity, a lasting physical toll layered atop the psychological aftermath of fifty-four days spent in fear.
Rather than retreat from public view, however, Schem has spent much of the time since travelling internationally to advocate for the hostages who remained behind, appearing before audiences in Israel, France and the United States to recount her experience directly.
Speaking at an event in Israel marking the Hebrew-calendar anniversary of the October 7 attacks, an audience of roughly 600 people that included bereaved families, social media influencers and foreign dignitaries, Schem offered one of her starkest public accounts of what she witnessed and endured that day.
“I stand before you today after I survived a cruel massacre, in which I saw, heard and smelled people being murdered, raped and burned,” she told the gathering, flanked by her mother. “I was shot in the hand at point blank and taken, alone, injured and powerless, to Gaza.”
It is worth noting that Schem’s account of witnessing atrocities inflicted on others at the festival is distinct from the specific violence she describes experiencing herself, the point-blank shooting and subsequent abduction, a distinction she has drawn carefully and consistently across her various public testimonies since her release.
A Story Still Being Verified, And Still Unfolding
As with much of the survivor testimony that has continued to surface publicly in the nearly three years since October 7, portions of Schem’s account rely on her own recollection of events experienced under extreme duress, in the dark, and under captivity conditions that would make independent, contemporaneous verification of every detail inherently difficult.
The Sunday Guardian has not independently verified all specific claims and quotes attributed to Schem in this reporting, which draw on her testimony as recorded by The Independent and by Israeli broadcasters Channel 12 and Channel 13, as well as her own written account published in Yediot Ahronot.
Where her testimony touches on matters that Israeli military investigators have since been able to corroborate, including the identity of the Hamas operative who abducted her, and the fate of her friend Elia Toledano, those details have been confirmed separately by the Israel Defence Forces.
The broader context surrounding Schem’s account remains, in its outlines, well documented. Israeli officials say Hamas-led militants killed roughly 1,200 people during the October 7 attacks and took 251 hostages into Gaza, figures that have anchored Israel’s public accounting of the day and its aftermath.
Dozens of hostages remain unaccounted for even now, with Israeli officials saying some are confirmed dead, and others’ fates remain unknown, a grim and unresolved backdrop against which survivors like Schem continue to share what they endured, not merely as personal testimony but as part of a broader public reckoning that shows no sign of concluding as the war’s third anniversary approaches.
For Schem, the promise made in a Gaza tunnel to the women left behind appears, three years on, to remain very much a work in progress.
