Beyond Horror
"The Girl Died": Hostage Survivor Reveals the Exact Moment Her Innocence Was Lost on October 7th
Mia Shem, a survivor of Hamas captivity, shares her harrowing journey from an innocent 21-year-old dancer to a determined woman, insisting that while physical freedom can be taken, the freedom to imagine hope cannot.
As autumn winds return and Sukkot decorations appear, Mia Shem recalls the dramatic transformation of her life two years ago. On the eve of Simchat Torah, she was a naive 21-year-old, thrilled to attend the Nova music festival in the south with her closest friend, Elia Toledano. She describes the dance floor as the center of the universe, a place of pure joy shared with thousands of other young people.
That innocence was brutally shattered within hours.
“Hamas monsters took my innocence forever,” Shem writes, explaining that they damaged both her body and her soul. She remembers the sun rising at 6:29 AM as she and Elia arrived. She filmed a short video of them dancing, feeling "as happy and free as I had ever been." The moment she closed her phone, the sirens wailed, the music was replaced by screams, and the sky filled with rockets. The nightmare had begun.
The Attack and the Abduction
As they fled, their car was confronted by a vehicle full of terrorists. Shem was shot at point-blank range in the arm, which was left dangling and bleeding profusely. They pulled over, hiding only a few meters apart, when Elia was captured. She heard him scream "Help!" but could do nothing, only seeing his footsteps fade away. Shem would not know then that she would never see him again.
Surrounded by a landscape of horror, bodies strewn from cars, severed limbs, and the screams of people being raped and slaughtered, Shem recognized that the world had ended. She states that the scenes she witnessed surpassed anything in Hollywood horror movies and will never leave her mind.
It was in that moment the girl she was died. She was violently seized by seven Hamas terrorists, pulled by her hair, and driven to Gaza amid their shouts of triumph and hate. Facing this unspeakable terror, Shem clung to one thought, one essential freedom no one could take: the way she would tell the story to herself, the way she would choose to act within the horrific reality forced upon her.
50 Days of Psychological Torture
In Gaza, Shem was held by one of her captors, Mustafa, and his wife, Wafa, who became the arbiters of her survival. She endured a crude, non-professional surgery to fix her shattered arm with a metal pipe inserted with no anesthesia or antibiotics. Her arm became infected and immobile. For 50 days, Mustafa sat across from her with a rifle pointed at her face. She was denied medical care and painkillers, receiving only one bottle of water and a piece of dry pita every few days, and was not allowed to shower once. Trapped in a small, airless room as bombings shook the walls, she was subjected to constant psychological terror.
Her survival technique, developed since childhood, was self-talk. “You’re on your way to Gaza, Mia,” she recalled telling herself. “You’re alone, and you’re wounded, but you’ll be okay.” She reassured herself, "You’ll be okay, Mia, you have yourself!"
From the Cage to Hope
Weakened and infected after 50 days, Shem was moved through the tunnels, two hours of walking, 60 meters underground, escorted by two armed guards. She was placed in a small, dark cage, only two by two meters, so low she couldn't stand upright. There, for the first time, she was not alone, meeting five other young women, each with her own brutal story.
During the five days they spent together in the dense darkness, guarded by rotating terrorists, Shem tried to encourage the other captives. One day, she whispered a plan: "Let’s hold hands and sing 'Shir LaMa’alot'." She explained the hymn was the song that sustained her when she was alone and reminded her of Friday night dinners at her grandmother's house. In the stuffy air of the dark circle, they sang the song together.
Two years later, Mia Shem is no longer the innocent girl of that night, but a strong woman with a story to tell. "My innocence remained in the fields of blood, and my heart remains captive in Gaza," she writes, alongside the 48 hostages, both living and deceased. She vows not to rest until they all return from the hellish depths of captivity. "I want the whole world to hear that they can take our physical freedom, but not the freedom to believe and imagine hope." She ends with a fervent prayer that the returning autumn winds will bring all the captives home.