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Human Rights Voices
While the UN devotes its human rights operations to the demonization of the democratic state of Israel above all others and condemns the United States more often than the vast majority of non-democracies around the world, the voices of real victims around the world must be heard.
U.N. Obsession with Condemning
Israel Instead
Freed hostage Mia Schem, right, speaks at an event marking the anniversary of October 7, 2023, as her mother Keren Schem stand by her side. (Screen capture)
Palestinian Authority/Gaza, October 30, 2024
Freed hostage Mia Schem says she was kept in cage with 5 other women still in Gaza
Original source
Freed hostage Mia Schem said Monday that she was held underground for five days in a tight cage with five other young women who are still in captivity in Gaza.
Speaking in Hebrew at the Israeli consulate in New York, Schem said that, injured and weak after 50 days in captivity, she was marched for two hours through Gaza’s tunnels, with “an armed terrorist in front [and] an armed terrorists in back” taking her 60 meters (197 feet) underground to a 1.5-meter (5-foot) -tall cage “without air, without light.”
“There I met five young women, each with their own horrific abduction story,” she said. “We spent five days in that dark cage, with two armed guards changing shifts every 12 hours.”
Schem said she tried to encourage the other hostages.
“I told them we would soon get out,” said Schem. “We were injured and shocked by what had happened to us. Just a few weeks before, we had been innocent girls.”
“On the fifth day, I was released,” said Schem. “I was able to hug them and promise them that they’ll be released tomorrow, that we’ll meet again in our country and pick up the pieces.”
“It’s been a year. I’m here in body, but my innocence remains in the fields of blood, and my heart remains hostage in Gaza with five young women still held there, tortured and abused, without air, in the chambers of hell,” she said.
It was unclear who the five other hostages were or where in Gaza the cage was located.
Schem, a 22-year-old tattoo artist, was one of 105 women and children Hamas released during a weeklong ceasefire in November, in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners.
She was kidnapped from the Reim-area Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel to kill some 1,200 people and take 251 hostages, sparking the war in Gaza.
“I stand before you today after I survived a cruel massacre, in which I saw, heard and smelled people being murdered, raped and burned,” Schem, flanked by her mother Keren, told the audience at the consulate. “I was shot in the hand at point blank and taken, alone, injured and powerless to Gaza.”
Schem was speaking at an event marking the Hebrew-calendar anniversary of the onslaught. According to Ynet, the event was attended by some 600 people, including bereaved families, social media influencers and foreign dignitaries.
It is believed that 97 of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 34 confirmed dead by the IDF. Hamas released 105 civilians during a weeklong truce in late November, and four hostages were released before that.
Eight hostages have been rescued by troops alive, and the bodies of 37 hostages have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the Israeli military as they tried to escape their captors.
Hamas is also holding two Israeli civilians who entered the Strip in 2014 and 2015, as well as the bodies of two IDF soldiers who were killed in 2014.
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