Mia Schem slams ‘pro-Palestinian sheep,’ Drake as she recounts Hamas captivity

Three years after she was abducted to the Gaza Strip, Mia Schem is recounting the terrifying moments of the morning of October 7, the horrors she endured in Gaza and what she calls a mentality of “pro-Palestinian sheep.” In an interview with the Daily Mail, Schem, the first hostage whom Hamas featured in a psychological warfare video, released on October 16, spoke about the rising wave of antisemitism and her disappointment with musician Drake. 'I think people don’t understand anything. People follow what others say, like sheep. They follow one another,” she said of the rise in antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment around the world. “They follow what they see in the news. The news presents what it wants people to see. I can only tell you what I know from my own experience: I was kidnapped from my country and taken into Gaza. I know how they treated me there.” That treatment, she said, was particularly cruel: “They teach their children from the very beginning to hate, to become terrorists and to glorify death. If you kill Jewish people, your parents in Gaza are proud of you. You have brought pride to your family. I thought perhaps the women would be different. Woman to woman, I thought there might be a little humanity. But there was nothing. It was worse with the wife of the man who held me captive. She hated me because I was being kept in the same room as her husband, the man who had kidnapped me. She was jealous and so cruel. Sometimes she would give me food only once every two or three days. I would get one bottle of water, perhaps two, for the whole week. It was only enough to keep me alive, not because they cared about me.” The children of the terrorist who held her captive were also cruel to her. “They would tease me with food: "Do you want food?" Then they would not give it to me. They treated me like an animal in a cage.” Schem added in the interview: “I know what it means to be Israeli and Jewish. In the Torah, we are taught, first of all, to be a good person, a good human being. After that comes the other things. Being a good person is what matters. What I experienced in Gaza was completely different. I saw people glorifying death. When a terrorist dies after carrying out an attack, his family can be proud of him.” Speaking about Drake, whose latest song includes the line “we pray for Gaza,” Schem said: “I loved him very much. He even gave me a sweater, a jacket from his brand. But I was shocked by the song he released about Gaza.'” In the Daily Mail interview, she also described the physical and emotional scars left by her captivity: “Listen, the fact that I am sitting here in front of you is a miracle. Even talking about it now, I find myself getting stuck on the words. It is beyond anything I can explain. Look at my hand. This arm is shorter than the other because they shot me at point-blank range. My arm was almost completely disconnected. Only a small part of it was still attached to my body. I picked up my own arm from the floor and carried it with me. I screamed. I still cannot get my head around it. I lost an enormous amount of blood — something like five litres. It’s a miracle that I’m alive. And they gave me nothing. Nothing at all.” Schem arrived at the Nova music festival with her close friend, Elia Toledano. “Everything happened so fast. Five minutes earlier I was dancing with my best friend. It was as though I closed my eyes and opened them again, and I was in Gaza. It happened so quickly that I couldn’t take it in. There were Hamas terrorists everywhere, so I didn’t see the face of the person who shot me. I'’m only starting to feel it now. Sometimes I can talk about what happened, and then suddenly I have to stop. But I think that is good for me. I want to understand what happened to me and how I can go on from it. I just can’t talk about Elia. It is very hard. He was someone extraordinary. People say that God takes only the good people. It is not a lie. It really is true. He was an angel.” Describing her abduction to Gaza, she said: “There were seven Hamas terrorists with me in an ordinary private car with five seats. They dragged me by my hair, pushed me into the car and forced my head down. That is all I can say. I really cannot talk about the rest of it today.” Despite all the horrors she endured during her 55 days in captivity, Schem said she wants a different future. “I don’t want to spend my life being sad, constantly reminding myself of what happened just to feel sad again. I want to build a home in Israel. I want to get married. I want to build a home in Israel. I want to be happy. Having children is my biggest dream. I don’t have a boyfriend. I think I will only be able to open my heart to somebody else when I am in a good place within myself. Right now, that is a process.”