Calm voice, chosen words and piercing gaze, Mia Shem, 21, recounts her 55 days of captivity in the Gaza Strip by Hamas to two Israeli channels. Her arm in a cast, and often on the verge of tears, she reveals the details of her delight. She claims to have “experienced a holocaust”. The interview will be broadcast simultaneously at 8 p.m. (7 p.m. in Paris) on private channels 12 and 13, this Friday, December 29.
In extracts already broadcast, the young woman first recounts her kidnapping on the Tribe of Nova festival site. “I was on the ground, covered in blood, I screamed that I had lost my hand […] someone started touching my upper body, then out of nowhere someone pulled me by my hair. They put me in a car and we went to Gaza,” recalls Mia Shem. She also remembers the operation she underwent by a veterinarian on her left arm, without painkillers: “I was like a beast in a zoo […] I almost choked on my own tears.”
Later, she was held by a Gazan family, who subjected her to several mistreatments. First there is the impossibility of sleeping because of the constant presence of her guard, sitting opposite her twenty-four hours a day. “He was raping me with his eyes,” confides the young Franco-Israeli woman. She owes her salvation, according to her, only to the presence of her jailer’s wife and children in the next room. She also remembers the humiliations of this wife. “She said [à son mari] that my hair was fake, she brought him food, but not me, for one, two, three days,” she explains. For Mia Shem, her captivity in a family home leaves no doubt about the Gazans’ total allegiance to Hamas. According to her, all members, including women and children, “were involved.” “Everyone there is a terrorist,” she insisted.
Deteriorating living conditions
Mia Shem’s shocking testimony is not the only story of captivity made public. Although many have not yet spoken and 129 Israelis are still hostages of Hamas, several people wanted to testify, like Ruti Munder, 78 years old. She claims to have been neither tortured nor ill-treated. However, the hostage released on the first day of the truce told Channel13 that her living conditions quickly deteriorated.
“At first it was okay,” she explained, according to the translation ofAssociated Press. The hostages ate “chicken with rice, all kinds of canned goods and cheese.” “We also received tea in the morning and evening, and the children received sweets.” A menu that evolved as the situation deteriorated in the Gaza Strip. In the end, the hostages who would have been held in cellars or tunnels ate only rice and pita bread, and “not on a regular basis”, as also recounted by his daughter, Keren Munder, quoted by the Times of Israel. “Some days they only ate pita.”
A majority of the hostages slept on plastic chairs lined up, like in a waiting room. Ruti Munder clarified that she covered herself with a sheet but that not everyone had one. Some boys slept on the floor. Despite these circumstances, the 78-year-old woman did everything to sleep as long as possible, in order to “pass the time”. Because the rest of the day, they remained locked in a room with permanently closed curtains. “It was stifling. I was just able to open the window to get some air.” “When we needed to go to the bathroom, we had to knock on the door and sometimes wait an hour and a half before we could go,” says Ruti Munder’s niece.
Children forced to whisper
A relative of the Franco-Israeli Erez, 12, and Sahar Kalderon, 16, told LCI microphone that after being taken to the Gaza Strip “in a savage manner”, the children lived “52 days in tunnels, without seeing the day and without being able to speak”. They had to whisper to communicate. So much so that according to Thomas Hand, who found his daughter on Monday, Emily was “only whispering, we couldn’t hear her”. “I had to put my ear to his lips,” he said. told on CNN. In question, the “conditioning” they underwent during the hostage-taking. But “no one” hit the children, says Thomas Hand based on his daughter’s account, believing that “the sheer force of the voices” of the terrorists should be enough to control the youngest.
“Every time a child cried, they threatened him with a gun to keep him quiet,” reports BFM Deborah Cohen, the aunt of young Eitan, one of the French hostages of Hamas. “Arrived in Gaza, all the civilians, everyone, hit him. We’re talking about a 12-year-old child!” she says indignantly. The young boy was also forced to watch “the horror film”, that is to say the images of the Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7.
Yarden Roman-Gat, a young German-Israeli woman, also wanted to testify. She was kidnapped during the attack on Kibbutz Beeri, Israel, where she was with her 3-year-old daughter, Geffen, and her husband Alon, visiting his parents. The thirty-year-old was driven to Gaza, where “a lot of people” crowded around her vehicle. “My captors couldn’t help but display me like a trophy, showing my face like an object. I was not a person,” she said. “It’s a very frightening experience to be in a war zone. You can’t ignore it. It’s very intense,” this physiotherapist testified to CBS. Released on November 29, she believes she is now a “different person”.