Freed Israeli Hostage: Hamas Operated on Me Without Anesthetic

Former hostage Mia Shem, 21, says that Hamas forced her to endure surgery performed by a veterinarian and without anesthetic after she was taken to Gaza during the terror attack of October 7 and that she was held captive in ordinary Palestinian civilian homes.

As Breitbart News reported in November, Shem (or Schem), a dual French and Israeli citizen, was released during a seven-day truce between Hamas and Israel. She was first forced to run a gauntlet of fanatical Hamas supporters, while she was filmed, and to say that she had been treated well.

Shem was also in the first hostage video released by Hamas, which showed her receiving treatment — from a veterinarian, it was later learned — for her arm, in which she had been shot during the Hamas assault on the Supernova music festival in Israel.

On Thursday, Israel’s Channel 13 released excerpts of an interview with Shem. She described her experience of 54 days in captivity, while wounded, as having endured a “holocaust.” She also described the Palestinian civilian population as being deeply entwined with Hamas.

The interview will be broadcast on Friday. From the Israeli news website Ma’ariv:

It was important for me to reflect the real situation on the people who live in Gaza, who they really are, and what I went through there. I went through the Holocaust, everyone there is a terrorist. There are families under Hamas. I started asking myself questions — why am I in a family’s house, why are there children here, why is there a woman here.

Shem also described her surgery:

There are thought to be 128 hostages still in Gaza, after the reported murder of American-Israeli Judy Weinstein on Thursday.

As Breitbart News has reported, there are numerous accounts of Palestinian civilians joining in Hamas terrorist activities.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.