‘ Hamas shot me at point-blank range’: Israeli hostage recounts her October 7 abduction into Gaza

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 would be shot in the arm by a Hamas militant and taken hostage into the Gaza Strip, and 378 people from the festival would be dead.

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 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 their car was riddled with bullets.