"You Can Choose Light and Choose Life"

"Then they shot at us. The car lost control, flipped over and  stopped. The doors were locked. We realized we couldn't get out, so we got out from the windows. The moment I landed on the ground, I was shot at point blank range."

"What good are your [United Nations] resolutions, your debates, your empty promises, if the sick, elderly, mothers and their children are left to rot in the terror tunnels?"

Israeli Hamas hostage Mia Schem

Chaim Otmazgin, one of the first ZAKA volunteers to arrive at the scene of the Nova massacre, forces himself to share the horrific stories because he ‘promised the bodies’ he would be their mouthpiece. Lisa Hostein; Photos of those who were murdered or abducted dot the landscape of the Nova music festival site. Yael Ilan

 

At the Nova Music Festival in Southern Israel on October 7, 2023, then-21-year-old Mia Schem, along with her friend Elia Toledano fled when "red alert" sirens sounded, with rockets from Gaza flying overhead. Twenty minutes driving away from the festival location failed to bring them to safety. When Mia Schem was shot as she emerged from the toppled car, she realized that pieces of her right hand were "flying into the air". She was was in the presence of burning cars, scattered bodies of the young festival-goers.

 

She made a split-second decision, her survival instinct directing her to "walk toward the terrorists", reasoning that to do so, might be her only chance of survival. "I was dragged by my hair into a truck with seven Hamas monsters", she recalled. Held captive initially in a private home in Gaza, she was later transferred to the Hamas' infamous tunnel system. There, she was placed in a small cage: "They treated me like an animal. They didn't give me any medicine, any treatment, nothing".

 

 A grab from a UGC video posted on Telegram on October 9, 2023, shows an armed Palestinian terrorist walking around the Supernova music festival, with a body behind him, near Kibbutz Re’im in the Negev desert in southern Israel (ANONYMOUS / AFP)

 

Held in this manner for 55 days, she was eventually released on November 30, 2023. The body of her friend, Elia Toledano, was returned to Israel several months later. A year afterward, while around a hundred hostages remained in captivity in Gaza, she addressed the United Nations Security Council, where she informed them that the Nova Festival was "a bloodbath". There, "hundreds of young men and women were shot, dismembered, raped and kidnapped".   

"I choose gratitude. Gratitude for the simple things. For waking up every morning. For breathing."

"For being able to hug my family. To be with my family."

"The most important thing I want people to understand is captivity didn't end the day I came home. My body came back, but part of my heart and soul is still there."
"Every day I make the choice to get  up and keep going, to live. I don't want people to remember me only as a hostage."

"I want them to remember me as a woman who chose life after everything I went through."

Mia Schem 

Screen capture from video of Hamas terrorist Muhammad Abu Aseed celebrates as he abducts IDF soldier Naama Levy on October 7, 2023.

 

During the time of her seemingly endless loss of normalcy, hope never left her tormented mind. She strove to be herself, to believe in herself, and to believe in others, and that some day she would be released, she would be reunited with her family, and she would go on to live her life, forever altered as it would be. In her dank, airless captivity, caged and incapable of normal movement, she turned to daily singing of Shir Lamaalot (A Song of Ascents), for comfort and to remind herself that she would surmount the trauma of what she had borne and witnessed.   

"I hope people understand what my story is. That my story is not only an Israeli story or Jewish story. It is a human story."

"Terrorism doesn't choose a religion and nationality, or skin colour. When we stay silent in the face of hatred and violence, everyone loses."

"I hope people will choose the trust, choose compassion, and the courage to stand with innocent people, and most of all, I want them to remember that there is always hope, even in the  darkest place."

"You can choose light and choose life." 

Mia Schem  

Screams Before Silence, October 7

 

"Death Alley"

"Earlier this week, I was speaking with a friend who met with the parents of a young female hostage."

"Should their daughter not be released imminently, they are terrified that, on top of all the existing horror and trauma, if she is pregnant, an abortion may not be possible."

"Based on testimonies, it is believed that several female captives are pregnant."

Vivian Bercovici, former Canadian ambassador to Israel 

A covered body is seen lying on the ground in Kfar Aza.

Muhammad Darwish/CNN

 

Official Israeli investigations into the October 7 terrorist attack in southern Israel confirms that an estimated three thousand terrorists comprised of Hamas operatives as well as Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terror groups breached the border fence between Gaza and Israel in dozens of places, to enter Israel on foot, by truck, motorcycles and SUVs, followed by ordinary Palestinian men, in the presence of Palestinian journalists and photographers to document their entry as a tour-de-force of Palestinian 'resistance' against 'occupation'.

Those thousands fanned out in pre-arranged directions, following an orchestration of planned violence that had been endlessly rehearsed in mock villages set up near the border in Gaza as training events for the attack that would result on October 7. They were well prepared, in possession of maps laying out the areas with identification for the villages to be attacked. They had precise statistics of where weapons were stored in the villages and knew the location of homes of kibbutz security officers.

As they stormed those agrarian villages, the initial attention was given to secure the armouries, then to attack the homes of the security officers. An orgy of murder, torture, mutilations, gang rape, arson, looting and hostage-taking ensued in a murderous bloodbath of civilian populations. Early that morning a barrage of thousands of rockets had been unleashed from Gaza into Israel. That distraction gave cover to the thousands of terrorists run amok in mayhem and slaughter.

 

A screenshot from a video, geolocated by CNN, shows six Hamas militants arriving at Be'eri on Saturday morning local time. Obtained by CNN

The kibbutz of Kfar Aza was one of the worst-hit of the villages that had been methodically destroyed, its inhabitants killed, whether elderly and incapacitated or infants and children. A special drama took place in one of the besieged homes where the mother of ten-month-old twins exited her family's safe room planning to warm bottles of milk formula for her babies. A sniper shot her dead. Her husband followed and was shot dead.

The two infant girls cried for the next ten hours. The sniper shot at anyone who tried to attempt a rescue of the babies. When it was fully understand that anyone who would attempt to save the the children would pay with their lives, rescue efforts came to a tragic halt. 

In the village, rows of homes are now cordoned off with hazard tape, spray painted with codes and symbols indicating the dates they had been inspected by the military. Also noted is the fate of those who had occupied the area now called 'Death Alley'. Murdered. Missing. Taken hostage.

Doron Steinbreacher, 30, remains a hostage held by Hamas who released a video of her sitting alongside two younger women held a captive with her for the entire four months. Her mother in an interview initially felt relieved to see her daughter alive, yet seeing her condition, it was devastating; gaunt and pale. Hostages are known to have been starved, little water, no medicine, in unsanitary conditions.

From hostages that had been released in a prisoner exchange that took place in November, it is well known that the young women are repeatedly raped. They are given clothing like lingerie to wear. They are given Arab names; their identities are stolen, they have become violently-abused concubines. 

 

One young hostage released in November, 21-year-old Maya Regev, informed a group of UN ambassadors the conditions in which she existed in Gaza. She had her clothing ripped from her, her earrings torn from her ears, was given a new name. For laughs they would occasionally beat her over her injured foot and as she writhed in pain, they appeared entertained. 

Of the 750 residents of Kibbutz Kfar Aza, sixty-two were murdered. Eighteen of the residents were taken hostage. It had taken the Israel Defense Forces close to three days to finally ensure that all of the terrorist were cleared out of Kfar Aza. 

 Kibbutz Kfar Aza in in southern Israel.  David Necochea / NBC News