The Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas broadcast on Monday October 16 on its official Telegram account the video of “one of the prisoners in Gaza” in which a young woman speaking Hebrew appears. In this video, impossible to immediately authenticate, we see a young woman awake and lying down, receiving treatment on her arm. The caption indicates that she was kidnapped “on the first day” of the Hamas attack on Israeli soil, on October 7. The young woman says she is being held in Gaza and calls for her release, saying she is being treated well. In a second sequence, she appears on camera and says she is from central Israel.
According to several media, it is a young Franco-Israeli woman, Mia Schem, aged 21. A family representative, who was part of a group of French families who last week called on President Emmanuel Macron to help free their missing loved ones, confirmed her identity to Reuters.
Mia participated in the Tribe of Nova trance festival like some 3,500 people during the Hamas attack. Mia’s mother told France 24 that she had tried to contact her for hours, in vain. The young woman reportedly sent a final message to a friend she was with, saying: “They are shooting at us. Please come and save us!” Still according to France 24, Mia and her friends tried to escape by car, before being caught by the terrorists. “When she sent her last message, she was hurt,” her mother added.
“My princess, my baby, is alive,” her mother said on Monday on the Israeli channel Chanel12. “I didn’t know anything and I hoped she was alive.” “I could see that she had something like surgery, that she is in pain, that she is scared, but thank God she is stable,” she added, referring to the injury on his daughter’s arm and the treatment shown in the video released by Hamas.
