I was taken hostage by Hamas on October 7. I feel as though I’m still there

M ia Schem seems to step outside herself when she recalls the events of three years ago. It is as if she is looking for the person she was before she attended the Nova festival, the dance party from where, on October 7, 2023, she was kidnapped and held hostage for 55 days. Her sentences stop and start, drift off and intensify, and flit between timelines as she sits on a plush cream sofa in the garden of her cottage, surrounded by birdsong. Most commented 1 Niqabs and burqas harm society, says Tory shadow minister Politics 197 comments 2 Trump: Let Iran take out LA or San Diego US politics 53 comments 3 Zohran Mamdani has betrayed us over Israel, say young socialists US politics 63 comments 4 August Hanning: Ex-German spy chief arrested for espionage and treason Europe 25 comments 5 Asos ‘hacked’: app customers receive alert suggesting data breach Companies & Markets 23 comments “Just entering the month of October makes me freeze up,” she told The Times. “People think I came back from captivity and I look normal but they have no idea what I’m going through. Top stories 1 Andrew takes Thames Valley police to court over Jeffrey Epstein investigation Royal family “I might have come back physically but it’s not over. Only my body came back.” KOBI WOLF FOR THE TIMES Schem, a tattoo artist who became an emblem of the Israeli hostage crisis during the Gaza conflict, was the first face, out of the 251 people seized by Hamas , that the rest of the world saw alive in the weeks and months that followed. Advertisement “Please get us out of here as quickly as possible,” she said to the camera in a video released to the public four days after she was taken. Hamas told her it would be seen around the world. Keren Shelf, Schem’s mother, during a press conference in Tel Aviv ten days after her kidnap ABIR SULTAN/EPA Schem was captured at Nova, an open-air trance party where young Israelis were still dancing at dawn. It was held near the Gaza border and at the peak of the party, just as the sun began to rise over the desert and the music dropped, the dancers scattered. Top stories 1 Six thrilling Costa Rica trips with Times Holidays Promoted content The sound of rockets at 6.29am sent Schem and her friend Elia Toledano scrambling to escape, as Hamas gunmen descended on the festival. Toledano’s body was later recovered from Gaza, where he is believed to have died in an airstrike in the ensuing war. Of the partygoers, 378 were killed and 44 were captured. Their fate was part of the worst loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust, an attack that cost more than 1,000 lives. It triggered a war over Gaza, into which Lebanon and Iran were also drawn, which has riven the Middle East and politics around the world. Advertisement By the time she was seized, Schem had spent three hours on the run. She saw more in those hours than her brain allows her to recall. “My desire to live was stronger than anything else. Stronger than any terrorist, stronger than any … body I’ve ever seen,” she said. KOBI WOLF FOR THE TIMES Schem says that even now there are deep gaps in her memory. She cannot join the dots of that day. “I feel this stone that sits in my heart that I’m dying to tell, to unburden myself, but I’m not able,” she said. “Every night, I try to remember the situation, to understand. There are so many things that have disappeared from my memory and I’m not able to remember, it drives me crazy.” Advertisement She said that she witnessed Hamas militants raping the bodies of Israeli victims. The extent of sexual violence and rape inflicted on the day remains one of the attack’s most hotly contested issues. But a UN report in the aftermath noted that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that the sexual violence inflicted on that day included rape and gang rape, with at least two incidents relating to the rape of women’s corpses. “I want to remember, I want to — there are things that have just disappeared. There are so many pieces of my story that I can’t remember,” Schem said. “Even the thought of going through what I went through, that they shot me, kidnapped me … the level of terror I can’t even explain to you, suddenly, I have that feeling again coming up every day. “It’s not just fear — it’s everything I felt there, I didn’t allow myself to feel there, when I was in survival mode. Suddenly, I feel it here. It possesses me and I shut down. “My brain is trying to protect me. The fact that they shot me, they kidnapped me, I was in a massacre — suddenly from a party to — it’s a horror film that I witnessed and I am still there. Advertisement “It’s been three years since October 7 and I cannot get past that day.” Schem was seen in a video filmed by Hamas and released to the world on October 16, 2023 Schem was trying to escape by road with Toledano when their car came under fire. A Hamas gunman then shot her in the arm at “very, very” close range. The two friends tried to get away on foot but Toledano was taken. Terrified, she played dead. Thinking she saw an Israeli, she called for help, but it was another armed attacker who told her to get up. He began to touch her chest. She screamed and the man, who then noticed her bleeding shattered arm, “recoiled and stopped”. Another man grabbed her by the hair, pulled her into a car and drove her across the border. Advertisement After days in hospital, where her injured left hand was operated on without anaesthetic, Schem was taken to a Gazan family home. Her captor was constantly with her, sleeping in the same room, something that made his wife jealous. “She abused me mentally and deprived me of food and water,” Schem said. “She would tell me that I would be married off in Gaza. She would always tell me that my eyes were fake, my lips were fake, that she would make sure I was sent to the tunnels.” Israeli troops patrol the festival site on October 12, 2023 TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER Jack Hill A few months ago, Ibrahim Abu Sakkar, the Hamas militant who captured Schem, was killed in an Israeli airstrike. Schem says she doesn’t remember his face, only his eyes. Binyamin Netanyahu , the Israeli prime minister, has vowed to hunt down all those who took part in the massacre. The head of Israel’s military intelligence directorate this week said that 4,000 of the 6,000 assailants who entered Israel that day had been killed so far. Life even after her release has not been easy. Last year, she filed rape charges against a personal trainer, also claiming that she had been sedated with a date-rape drug. No charges were brought. But his abuse of her trust, she said, had made it even harder to interact with other people. Now, she prefers to be at home alone, finding it easier to hide away. A grab from a video posted on Telegram on October 9, 2023, shows an armed Palestinian militant walking around the festival grounds, near Kibbutz Reim in the Negev desert ANONYMOUS/AFP Those are the edges of Schem’s life. In the aftermath of her release, she advocated for the hostages at the UN and the White House, speaking at events to explain the Israeli narrative on Gaza. Recently, she has become a model and actor and was cast in a musical based on The Lion King . Beneath the public profile, though, Schem, who was 21 when she was kidnapped, hopes she can process all she went through and restart her life. She wants to meet a man, and have ten children, she said. But that time has not come yet. “This week I just want to close my phone and get out of here, leave the country,” she said. “I can’t go to any memorials, to any graves. But I have the will to live and that’s why I’m still here.”