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One of the freed Israeli hostages has stood before the UN’s General Assembly this week to deliver a rebuke to the organization, and to demand that the remaining hostages, estimated at 101, be freed.
In videos posted to X by Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Mia Schem criticized what Danon referred to as “the moral failure of the UN … since that Black Sabbath on October 7th.”
“It has been over a year and the UN has not lifted a finger to free the hostages,” Schem said. “You sit here in your comfortable chairs debating the lives of my friends as if they are a political issue and not innocent people being tortured by terrorists. I ask you, why do we (even have) a United Nations if it won’t stand for us in the darkest of moments?”
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She continued: “Look at me! I am proof they can still be saved. In this moment, 60 metres underground with no air, no light, no hope, my friends are still being held by monsters. My heart is still with them, captive in Gaza. I stand here and demand that you bring them all home now. Just be human. Find some morality, find some courage, and speak up.”
Schem, a French-Israeli woman, was 21 and attending the Supernova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists attacked. “It became a bloodbath,” she said, adding that her best friend was kidnapped in front of her and later murdered: “I will never see him again.”
She was dragged to a car and taken to Gaza, where she was held captive for more than 50 days, during which a bullet wound in her arm grew more and more severe.
“The Hamas terrorists would sit in front of me in a dark room with a gun pointed at my head,” she recalled. “Where was the red cross? where was the UN demanding that they have access to us?”
Schem was featured in a video released by Hamas a week after the attacks. “I’m Mia Shem, 21 years old from Shoham,” she said in that video. “Currently, I’m in Gaza. I returned early Saturday morning from Sderot — I was at a party. I was seriously injured in my hand.” She called on Israel to “get me out of here as soon as possible.”
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She was released on Nov. 30, one of eight hostages allowed to leave during a brief ceasefire between Israel and Hamas at the time. She required life-saving surgery when she got home.
In her statement to the UN, Schem described being held in a small cage with five other women during her captivity, adding: “I stand here to echo the cries of the 101 hostages who have now been in hell for over a year.”
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