Mia Schem recounts Nova festival attack and 55 days in Hamas captivity

At 6:29am on 7 October 2023, Mia Schem was filming a video with her friend Elia Toledano when the sound of rockets started.

They had been waiting for the sun to rise over the Negev desert in southern Israel at the Nova music festival, just 3 miles from the Israel-Gaza border.

By the end of the day, the 21-year-old describes how she was shot in the arm by a Hamas militant and taken hostage into the Gaza Strip, and 378 people from the festival would be among 1,200 people killed. Israel launched a relentless two-year barrage of strikes in response, leaving 70,000 Palestinians dead in Gaza and reducing much of the enclave to rubble.

In the early days of the war, Hamas released a video of Schem in captivity, the first footage of any of the 251 hostages. The French-Israeli citizen was held in Gaza for 55 days before being released during a brief truce between Israel and Hamas.

Speaking with The Independent in London, Schem has flown from her home in Shoham, a town on the outskirts of Tel Aviv in Israel.

She said she had only decided to attend the music festival on a whim. “I remember that I asked Elia, ‘Do you want to go to the Nova Festival?’ and he tell me ‘Yes, why not?’” she says.

She drove to Toledano’s house, her best friend, and they took his car to the festival site.

“I didn’t know the party was close to Gaza,” she says, because the organisers of the Nova festival tended to share the locations of the raves only a few hours before the scheduled start time.

Even if she had known that information, it would not have impacted her decision to go. “Who thought that something like that would happen,” she says.

Once the rockets started, Schem grabbed Toledano and headed straight for his car. She believes they were one of the first few cars to leave the Nova festival site.

At this stage in the day seemingly innocuous decisions would decide whether or not you would survive the terrorist attack.

When leaving the festival site those who turned right were saved, Schem says, and those who turned left towards Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were met by Hamas.

“Me and Elia were the first people to see the terrorists,” she says. Hamas gunmen were standing at either side of the road, shooting at cars and killing passengers as they sped past. Schem thought there could have been as many as 40 gunmen in the road.

Schem floored it through the roadblock but says their car was riddled with bullets.

The vehicle rolled twice, and Toledano and Schem were forced to escape out of the vehicle’s windows, as the doors were jammed. They tried to hide next to the car.

Toledano grabbed her phone and began calling the emergency services, but the messages that came back were grim.

“They tell us on the phone, ‘You need to hide. We can’t help you,’” Schem says, “Nobody came to save us.”

When she was hiding on the ground, she was shot in the arm by a Hamas terrorist: “ They shot me from point-blank range.”

Both Schem and Toledano were abducted and taken into Gaza. Only one of them would return alive.

The body of Elia Toledano would be eventually retrieved by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from the Gaza Strip in late 2023.

There was a “high probability” that his cause of death was due to an Israeli airstrike, according to an IDF investigation.

When describing her time in Hamas captivity in Gaza, Schem is unequivocal. She was treated like an “animal in a cage,” she recounts.

She believes the only reason she was saved from being raped was because she was being kept in the home of her captor.

“He didn’t touch me, but the reason was because his wife and children were behind the door,” Schem adds.

She said her captor’s wife would mistreat Schem because she resented the fact that she was in the same room as her husband: “She didn’t give me water or food.”

Five days before she was released, Schem says she was taken down into the tunnels beneath Gaza where she first encountered other hostages.Five women were also being held there.

Schem has told Israeli television that this was the hardest time of her captivity because of the hopelessness of the hostages she met down there.

Schem was in London to recount her story to an audience at the Nova Exhibition. The exhibition recreates the music festival with real wreckage brought over from Israel. “ It's a miracle that I'm here.” she says, “and if God saved me, I never give up.”

The exhibition has been travelling around the world, and London is the 10th city it has visited so far. Now, plans are underway for the exhibition to travel to Paris, Budapest and Prague in the future.

When the exhibition travelled to New York, hundreds of people gathered in Lower Manhattan to protest against Israel’s conduct since October 7th, with some accusing the show of being political propaganda.