Ex-hostage Mia Schem: Flashbacks from captivity, fact that captives are still in Gaza make it harder to heal

Mia Schem, who was released from Hamas captivity in November 2023 after 55 days in Gaza, says she cried this week as she watched American-Israeli captive soldier Edan Alexander come home on Monday.

“Edan returned to his mom, but he doesn’t know what I already do: that chapter two begins now,” she tells the 1,500-odd crowd at Hostages Square in the weekly demonstration.

“The recovery won’t be complete until the return of all the hostages,” she says, adding that the return “will be full of physical and emotional triggers, greetings from the hell we’ve been through, which will come without warning, again and again.”

Schem recalls how, when she was kidnapped from the Reim-area Nova music festival, “I was snatched to Gaza by seven Hamas monsters who pulled me by the hair into a car.

“I was afraid my scalp would be torn off,” she says. “My hair became a mass of dried-up blood and mud.”

When her captors filmed a ransom video of her, Schem says, “they were ordered to make me look good, so the world wouldn’t suspect how demonic they are.”

“But my hair was a knotted blob, so one of the captors approached me with scissors to cut my hair,” she says, adding that she had struggled against the forced haircut “with all my dwindled might” until her captors relented.

“I couldn’t bear the thought of losing my hair,” she says, likening herself to the Biblical Samson.

“Since then, whenever I see scissors, whenever I take care of my hair, that moment comes back,” she says. “My body shakes uncontrollably and I have trouble breathing.”

Schem, who recently revealed that she is the complainant who accused a well-known Tel Aviv trainer of rape, says she “recently had a terrible experience [and] was asked to cut a curl of my long hair for the [police] investigation.”

“My body reacted again with horror,” she says. “In a moment, I was thrown back to my days in captivity, to the human monsters who sought to cut my hair.”

“Anxiety attacks are a part of the returnees’ lives as a result of the hell we’ve been through,” she says. “They’re part of us and take a very heavy toll.”

“Every additional day in which our brothers and sisters experience emotional and physical torture by Hamas monsters makes it harder to recuperate and pick up the pieces,” she says.