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 holds French and Israeli citizenship, told The Post she can’t find peace until the remaining 101 hostages return home.
“I must fight for the rest of the hostages – this is my life,” said Schem, 22, who was released Nov. 30, 2023 as part of the first hostage deal after spending 54 horrifying days in the terrorists’ hands.
“I feel that 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 there.”
“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 on Oct. 7 from the Tribe of Nova music festival. 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 surgery. During her captivity, the wound radiated with pain, Schem said, but her abductors didn’t lift a finger to help her.
“They didn’t give me medicines 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’s a woman, there would be humanity.”
At one point, her captor brought her out of her dark room just so she could see her mom pleading on television for her daughter’s return.
“He told me, ‘Come look, this is the last time you see her. You’re not going back to Israel,” Schem recalled, adding she was routinely told to study the Koran.
“They told me all the time, ‘You will stay here, you will get married here.’ They tried to break my spirit, to make me weak inside.”
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Most haunting to 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 dark cage less than five feet high where she and the others languished. There, Schem heard about details of the other women’s abduction horrors.
When her captor told Schem she was to be released, the other hostages pleaded with her.
“They say, ‘Please, this is my full name, tell my family. Don’t forget us,’” she recalled with a shiver, adding she has a “picture stuck in my brain, that I’m leaving the other girls there.”
“I’m here in New York and they’re still there – in the tunnels,” she said.
She’s not only plagued physically from her nightmare ordeal, but emotionally.
“I can’t be in a closed room 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 HaDin, also known as the Israel Law Center, in Midtown.
She’s undergone two “complicated” surgeries since her release, the first of which sought to undo some of the damage inflicted to her arm in Gaza and a second to repair damaged nerves and made her hand shorter.
While advocating for the remaining hostages, Schem is awaiting further procedures to correct the extensive damage to her arm.
Life since her return has been fraught.
It was during her second surgery that she learned Toledano’s body had been returned to Israel.
“It was very devastating,” said Schem’s mother, Keren.
Two days later, Schem had her first-ever epilepsy attack.
“It lasted 10 minutes and was the most frightening thing I’ve ever seen,” said Keren, noting there’s no family history of the disease. “It happened because she didn’t eat or sleep in captivity, maybe one hour a day and ate and drank almost nothing.
“All the stress and fear and pain was inside, everything went out with the epileptic attack,” said Keren, adding that Mia now takes pills twice daily to manage the condition.
“This epilepsy attack is a result of all that she’s been through – physically and emotionally.”
Her advocacy mission to New York isn’t exactly the way she pictured touring the Big Apple.
“Before Oct. 7, my dream was to be in New York, to be in America, and to travel,” she said, noting how she’s here for all the wrong reasons. “And now in New York and I can’t feel New York.
“I can’t heal because there are still hostages there,” she said on the 390th day since the attacks. “One minute there is like a whole lifetime.”
