Human Rights Voices

Mia Schem was shot in the arm at point-blank range by a Hamas gunman, losing five litres of blood as she was dragged by terrorists into Gaza.

There, she was held like an 'animal in a cage', and told she would never return to her home in Israel, but would instead be married off to a man in the Palestinian enclave. 

Omer Wenkert was beaten with a metal rod, sprayed with pesticides and lost 40 per cent of his body weight while suffering for 505 days in an underground tunnel.

He began to crave death and even did a ritualistic ceremony where he bid farewell to his family, accepting his fate. 

Hadar Sharvit overheard the screams of Israeli women being raped by Hamas militants at the Nova festival site, and still remembers the smell of hundreds of burnt bodies. 

Hiding from terrorists only a few metres away from her, she apologised to her father over the phone, telling him she loved him — sure that her murder was only a few seconds away. 

On October 7, 2023, thousands of Hamas gunmen breached the southern border of Israel, slaughtering 1,200 people, mainly civilians, and taking 250 others hostage in the single-worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. 

Over two years after the terrorist attack that triggered the Israel-Gaza war, October 7 survivors are attempting to psychologically heal by recounting the traumatic memories that still keep them up at night.

Mia Schem

Recounting her story at the Nova Exhibition in London on Thursday evening, Schem, 24, routinely had to take pauses in her speech as she became choked up with tears.

'I don't want to die now. I don't want to die now,' she remembers repeating to herself after Hamas militants stormed the music festival, killing almost 400 revellers and taking 44 others hostage.

When trying to flee, she was shot in the arm, and felt her hand 'almost disconnect' from her body.

She watched in horror as Hamas soldiers took her friend, 28-year-old Elia Toledano, captive to Gaza with his arms tied behind his back.

That was the last time she would see Toledano, who was later killed by militants.

When taken to the Strip herself, Schem described how a terrorist screamed: 'Welcome to Gaza!'

Without proper medical attention, her wound was allowed to deteriorate, after doctors attempted to tie her hand to a 'piece of plastic'. 

'They treated me like an animal in a cage,' she says, recounting how she spent days locked in a room without windows, with a guard watching her every move. 

'They didn't give me any medicine... my body was broken, it's a miracle that I have a hand, I don't know how I survived 55 days without treatment,' she adds.

She was tormented by her guard's wife, who she describes as 'crazy' and cruel, depriving Schem of water for days at a time.

'I thought maybe I will never return back to Israel,' Schem says, adding: 'One of the terrorists came to me and told me: "You will never go back home. You stay here. You marry here."'

She was forced into recording a video for Hamas where they told her what to say, but, knowing her mother back in Israel would see the footage, she tried to communicate the truth of her experience with her eyes.

'My body was broken but my soul was strong like it never was before. I felt like my soul disconnected from my body because I didn't feel the pain. I imagined my mother all the time, and how the first meeting would be. I imagined my future wedding,' Schem says, describing how she maintained mental strength. 

Before her release on November 30, 2023, after 55 days in captivity, Schem was transferred from a house to an underground tunnel, where she was put in a cage with a number of other women.

'I couldn't stand up,' Schem says, recounting how there was 'no air and no light'.

She admits that it is only by speaking to the audience on Thursday that she has finally begun 'healing' from the experience, because up until now she hasn't been in touch with the pain — perhaps in an attempt to suppress the memories.

'It's something that I know will be with me all my life. But now I need to learn how to deal with the trauma...

'Sometimes I'm up, sometimes I'm down, but I will never give up on myself.'  

 Hadar Sharvit

When the music suddenly stopped at the Nova festival at 6.29am, Sharvit thought there must have been a problem with the sound system.

A few seconds later, she began seeing rockets and enormous smoke plumes in the sky.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, she described how she and her friend, Shalev Navarsky, attempted to flee the festival by car, but they soon got stuck in a traffic jam and were forced to escape on foot.

They ran through a forest, but terrorists soon closed in on them, forcing the pair to hide under a bush.

'I'm lying down, with my face on the ground. The terrorists are ten metres from me, and they're shooting,' she says, recounting how the sound of grenades and gunshots rang in her ears.

Throughout the ordeal, Sharvit was texting her 65-year-old father, who demanded that she send him her location, so he could come and help her reach safety.

But Sharvit, a maths teacher, was too scared to send her father the address, worried that he might endanger himself.

Instead, she decided to accept her fate and wish him farewell.

'I realised that probably, I need to say goodbye, and that I love him. He's telling me to stay calm, to buy some time, and that he's coming to find me. So he was on the way, and at that moment, I couldn't say no, because I needed help. 

'All the police officers that were around me got killed. I realised, in that moment, that I'm alone. He was telling me buy some time, to stay calm, saying: "I'm on the way to you." And again, I say: "I'm dying, I’m sorry, I love you."'

After running through a forest, the friends took cover under a citrus tree in a nearby orchard, yet before long the area was swarmed by Hamas militants too. 

From her hiding place, she overheard Israeli women being raped by gunmen.

'Everywhere, people were screaming, begging for their lives, getting murdered, and being abused by terrorists,' she says. 'The smell was unbelievable. Burnt bodies, blood, fire.'

Eventually, the orchard began to erupt in flames, so Sharvit and Navarsky decided to run to the nearest army checkpoint in an attempt to save their lives.

'I saw all the things that I heard. Parts of bodies on the ground, smoke everywhere, terrorists dead and alive,' she says.

'Everything was just like a horror scene that Hollywood would never create itself.'

From the army checkpoint, Sharvit managed to call her father, who was about to get into his car to come and find her. 

When they reunited, 'he held me so tight, I thought he would break my bones', she says.

Seeing him again was surreal, because Sharvit had already accepted she wouldn't make it home from the massacre alive.

'I was preparing myself to die,' she says, recalling how she did a 'death meditation' from under the citrus tree, where her life flashed before her eyes.

On returning home, Sharvit's PTSD was so severe that she felt like a 'three-year-old baby' again, with every knock on the door reminding her of a bomb or a grenade.

She wasn't able to sleep with the light off, nor was she able to drive. She has also struggled with her memory, feels anger, and copes everyday with the strain of survivor's guilt, knowing that so many others died.

Nevertheless, she has found solace and community with fellow survivors. 'For me, to stay alive after this, it's a gift,' she says.

Omer Wenkert

In June 2024, Wenkert reached his breaking point in Hamas captivity.

Alone, starved and abused in an underground tunnel, Wenkert had just spent his 23rd birthday the preceding month in the company of no one except violent terrorists.

He had been kidnapped as a hostage at the Nova festival massacre, where his 22-year-old close friend, Irish-Israeli Kim Damti, was killed by grenades as the pair hid together in a bomb shelter.

That June, after over eight months in captivity — 197 days of which he spent totally isolated — Wenkert felt like a ‘broken vessel’.

‘They completely ripped my soul. There was nothing left inside me anymore… Even if they had, that second, teleported me to my house, to my family, I felt that I would never be a normal person again.’

For the next six hours, he began a ‘goodbye ceremony’, first to himself, and then to his brothers, his sisters and his parents, telling them out loud that he was sorry and that he would not be returning home alive.

But miraculously, Wenkert eventually conjured the internal power to survive, and was released after 505 days of torment on February 22, 2025.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, the 25-year-old described the 'humiliation' and torture he suffered at the hands of his Hamas captors, including being beaten with an iron rod, having pesticides sprayed all over his body and his eyes, and losing more than 36kg due to food deprivation.

Before he was kidnapped and his life changed forever, Wenkert was the manager at restaurant Nina Bianca, south of the central Israeli city of Rehovot, working up to 400 hours in a single month.

Twelve months before the Hamas-led invasion of southern Israel, Wenkert had lost his best friend in a separate terrorist attack. That year, partying became part of his healing, his ‘rehabilitation’, where he felt he could ‘clear the soul’.

In a spur-of-the-moment decision, he convinced his friend Damti to attend the Nova music festival, with the pair purchasing their tickets at 3.30am on October 7, 2023.

A few hours later, at 6.30am, only an hour after arriving at the festival, the pair heard the first bombs, and rocket sirens began blaring.

Wenkert got a text from his mother, asking if he was afraid. In the last message he sent to his family before disappearing into the Gaza Strip, he told her he was terrified.

After escaping the festival site in a car, the two friends rushed to a roadside bomb shelter along Route 232 with about 40 others. Only 12 made it out alive.

Hamas found the shelter and threw grenades inside, forcing Wenkert to hide behind bodies to survive. But when he realised the terrorists were preparing to burn everyone inside, he stepped outside, where gunmen captured him and threw him into a pickup truck en route to Gaza.

For the next 505 days, Wenkert didn’t see daylight once.

His first 54 days were spent underground with Liam Or, who had been abducted from Kibbutz Re’im, along with several Thai foreign workers.

‘It was very hard. We barely ate, we barely drank, we didn’t get a shower — even once — and we were unable to stand up, to move,’ he says.

‘I was terrified, one hundred per cent of the time.’

When his cellmates were freed in the first hostage deal in November 2023, Wenkert was transferred to another tunnel, around 90cm wide and 8-9m long, beginning his period of total isolation.

Without the comfort of fellow captives, Wenkert was sure he would ‘get crazy, real fast’.

For the next 197 days, Hamas guards visited him twice every 24 hours, each time for only a total of one minute, delivering him half a pita bread and a litre of water.

He was allowed to wash himself — using water from a two-litre bottle — only once every 60 days.

‘That’s it. They don’t talk to me, they don’t let me talk to them. Nothing.’

Over time, Hamas grew frustrated at their inability to secure a deal with Israel, and they let out their anger on Wenkert.

The showers stopped, and the humiliation began.

‘Every two or three days, the guard told me to stand up, go to the edge of the tunnel, and he sprayed bug spray on me — on my eyes, my mouth, all over my body, on my mattress, my spoon, my toothbrush, my plate.

‘It was May 22, 2024, my 23rd birthday, and he hit me with a huge iron rod… he just ran straight into me, hit me directly on my head, then my shoulders, my legs, my toes.’

The beatings went on for more than a week, multiple times per day.

By June, tortured and alone, Wenkert craved the peace of death.

‘For three days, I was literally broken,’ he says.

‘Lying on the ground on my back, looking at the ceiling, my eyes open. I didn’t feel anything, I didn’t do anything, I stopped thinking. I was just completely empty, for I had nothing inside me anymore.’

Then came a turning point.

On day 197, after Wenkert was ready to give up, fellow Israeli hostages Tal Shoham, Evyatar David and Guy Gilboa Dalal were transferred to his tunnel.

‘I looked at them like my lifeguards,’ he says, adding: ‘They really saved my life.’

Together, the four ‘became a family’, playing cards, chess, and talking about television and their favourite films to pass the time and keep each other sane, even while surviving the unimaginable.

‘We were still human, even there, underground, as terrorists guarded us in captivity,’ Wenkert says. 

‘We created a human life in the most inhumane conditions… it was hard, but we made our unit so powerful that nothing could break us.’

He was released on February 22, 2025, after 505 days in Hamas captivity, as part of a hostage release-ceasefire deal between Israel and the terror group that collapsed after its first phase.

Describing the day of his release, Wenkert said Hamas militants forced him and the other hostages into wearing 'stupid uniforms' and blindfolds as they were finally escorted out of the tunnel network.

Together, they sang the song Shir Lamaalot, 'A Song of Ascents', seconds before leaving their underground cell.

'It felt like victory spread all over my body,' he says, remembering the experience of seeing daylight again. At the time, he gestured a 'V' symbol to the sky with his index and middle finger as he stood on stage.

Eventually, he and the other hostages were transferred to the Red Cross, and were finally reunited with their families in Israeli hospital.

'I met my mother and my father for the first time,' he says. 'A moment I can't describe with words.'