Freed Hamas hostage Mia Schem ‘cannot heal’ until all remaining prisoners return home to their families: ‘This is my life’

A former Israeli hostage – who underwent surgery in Gaza at the hands of a veterinarian while she was held captive – by Hamas is in New York on a mission.

Tattoo artist Mia Schem, who has French and Israeli citizenship, told The Post that she cannot find peace until the remaining 101 hostages return home.

“I have to fight for the rest of the hostages – this is my life,” said Schem, 22, who was released on November 30, 2023 as part of the first hostage deal after spending $54. horrible days in the hands of the terrorists.

“I feel like I have a mission – to speak, to tell the world my story, for the other hostages who can’t,” she said. “And to be the voice for the girls who are still here.”

“My body is here,” she lamented, “but my heart is still there in Gaza. My soul is still in Gaza.”

Schem and her friend Elia Toledano were among those kidnapped from the Tribe of Nova music festival on October 7. Schem was also shot in the right arm.

In the first video released by Hamas a week later, she was shown with bandages wrapped around her arm after a three-hour operation. During her captivity, the wound radiated with pain, Schem said: but her captors didn’t lift a finger to help her.

“They didn’t give me any medicine for the pain – nothing,” she said.

“My hand didn’t connect to my body and she didn’t help me,” Schem said of her captor’s wife. “I think she is a woman, there would be humanity.”

At one point, her captor took her out of her dark room so she could watch her mother on television pleading for her daughter’s return.

‘He said to me: ‘Come and have a look, this is the last time you’ll see her. You are not going back to Israel,” Schem recalled, adding that she was routinely told to study the Quran.

“They kept telling me, ‘You stay here, you get married here.’ They tried to break my spirit, to make me weak inside.”

Most haunting for Schem is the unknown fate of the young female hostages held at the whims of their Hamas captors.

“In my last five days they took me to the tunnels, where I met five other girls,” she said of the tunnels dark cage less than one and a half meters high where she and the others languished. There Schem learned about details of the kidnapping horrors of the other women.

When her captor told Schem she would be released, the other hostages begged her.

“They say, ‘Please, this is my full name, tell my family. Don’t forget us,” she recalled with a shudder, adding that she had “an image in my head of me leaving the other girls there.”

“I’m here in New York and they’re still there – in the tunnels,” she said.

She is not only physically plagued by her nightmare, but also emotionally.

“I can’t be in an enclosed space without air. I can’t breathe even now,” she said. “I think about them all the time.”

Schem recalled her ordeal while attending a conference organized by Shurat HaDinalso known as the Israel Law Center, in Midtown.

She has undergone two “complicated” operations since her release, the first to reverse some of the damage her arm suffered in Gaza and the second to repair damaged nerves and shorten her hand.

While pleading for the remaining hostages, Schem awaits further procedures to repair the extensive damage to her arm.

Life since her return has been fraught.

During her second surgery, she got to know Toledano’s body was sent back to Israel.

“It was very devastating,” said Schem’s mother, Keren.

Two days later, Schem had her very first epilepsy attack.

“It lasted 10 minutes and was the most terrifying thing I have ever seen,” Keren said, noting there is no family history of the disease. “It happened because in captivity she didn’t eat or sleep, maybe an hour a day, and hardly ate or drank anything.

“All the stress, anxiety and pain was inside, everything came out because of the seizure,” Keren said, adding that Mia now takes pills twice a day to control the condition.

“This seizure is the result of everything she has been through – physically and emotionally.”

Her advocacy mission to New York isn’t exactly the way she envisioned a tour of the Big Apple.

“Before October 7, I dreamed of being in New York, being in America and traveling,” she said, noting that she is here for the wrong reasons. ‘And now in New York, I can’t feel New York.

“I can’t heal because there are still hostages,” she said on the 390th day since the attacks. “One minute lasts a lifetime.”