When Hamas terrorists invaded Israel on the morning of Saturday, Oct. 7, in addition to murdering more than 1,400 mostly civilian Israelis and foreign citizens and wounding more than 4,400 others, they also kidnapped as hostages around 200 more individuals.
Hamas has now released a video of one of those hostages, a young woman identified as Mia Schem, who looked to have been seriously injured and pleaded for help in what appeared to be a prepared statement for her to recite, according to Breitbart.
Schem had been missing since the morning of the attack, when she had been in attendance at a music festival that was targeted for a murderous assault by paragliding terrorists who left hundreds dead and wounded and missing in their wake.
In the video released Monday by Hamas, a clearly distraught Schem can be seen lying on a bed in pain while an off-camera individual tends to bandages on the young woman's upper arm, which appears to have been surgically repaired with stitches and metal pins.
The hostage is then seen sitting up as she delivers a statement in Hebrew that was translated to English as saying, "Hi, I am Mia Shem, I am 21 years old, from Shoham, at the moment I am in Gaza.
"I came back on Saturday towards morning from the area of Sderot, there was a party, I was badly wounded in my hand, from the party they took me to Gaza, they took me to the hospital for three hours, they are worried about me, they are taking care of me, they are giving me medicines, everything is fine," she added. "I’m just asking to be returned home as soon as possible, to my family, my parents and my brothers. Please get us out of here as soon as possible. Thank you."
Hamas releases its first footage of a hostage. The group says it is providing medical treatment to her. Though I think this is a poor attempt to show they are treating the hostages well. The hostage appears to be Israeli. pic.twitter.com/JDATGYenCr
— Joe Truzman (@JoeTruzman) October 16, 2023
Breitbart noted that the young woman's mother, Keren Schem, has been speaking to various media outlets over the past week in order to raise awareness about her missing daughter who is now confirmed to be among the estimated 200 hostages that Hamas kidnapped during the assault last weekend.
That included an interview last week with journalist Katie Couric, in which the distressed mother recounted what little she knew of her daughter's whereabouts and whether she was even alive or dead at that point in time.
After the Hamas video was released, The Times of Israel reported that Keren Schem held a press conference in which she begged the rest of the world to help Israel safely recover her daughter, who holds dual French-Israeli citizenship, and other hostages held by Hamas.
She said what Hamas had done was a "crime against humanity" and nothing short of "evil terror and inhumane." As for her daughter, it was clear to the mother that "she’s very terrified, in a lot of pain, and I can see that she’s saying what they’re telling her to say."
In further describing the emotional "rollercoaster" she has been on over the past week and a half, Schem nevertheless expressed how "optimistic" she was that her daughter, who she described as a "fighter" who had already "been through a lot in her life," appeared to be alive.
However, while the young hostage was certainly alive when the video was filmed, that may no longer be the case, as The Times noted that metadata derived from the video file revealed that it had originally been filmed nearly a week earlier, meaning Schem could have been killed since then, either by the terrorists themselves or accidentally in one of the hundreds, if not thousands, of airstrikes Israel has launched into Gaza since the initial attack.
