Another Update on the situation in Israel from Dr. Binyanin Klempner with his reflections on the war and a heartbreaking account of torture by one of the injured hostages who was released. Read on to understand her comment “There are no innocent civilians in Gaza.” Previous updates here.
Dear Friends,
In as much as you are reading my take on the war in Israel, embedding my thoughts into your thoughts, it is only right that I tell you a bit about myself to make you a more informed reader. First and foremost, I, by no means, consider myself a Zionist. Nor do I have any political leanings. I lean neither to the left, as do many of our military’s top brass; nor do I lean to the right, as do many of our State’s political leadership. Politically I fancy myself to be about as centered as the center of the Eiffel Tower. What I am is a lover of the people of Israel and of the Land of Israel. Whether right or left, dark or pale, I love the people of Israel. And, I love the land, the sandy beaches of her Mediterranean Sea shore, her wooded mountain summits in the north, her golden mountains of the desert, and the tall grasses lining her creeks. I love her rocks and panorama. Vistas and rocky crevices. Caves and alleyways. Her people, her smallest villages, and her largest cities. I love this land and I love her people. Nothing to do with Zionism or any other “ism.” Denuded of politics and ideology; just love, just basic love.
I spoke at length to two paratroopers during the first stop I made the other night. They said that they weren’t able to sleep much because the enemy could see the house that the army had put them up in. They’d rather be on-duty feeling safe than off-duty feeling like targets. Always afraid of missile attacks they couldn’t sleep, but showering was the worst. Sudsing up when the house they were in might be struck with a missile. Unenviable. They spoke about the average citizen moving further to the right after October 7th. Being hippies on a far left-wing leaning kibbutz and now, along with the rest of the kibbutz, seeing the world through a significantly more right-wing perspective. They spoke about the left being a causality of October 7th. They spoke about their outrage towards the generals who didn’t take the intelligence given to them about the upcoming October 7th massacre seriously. And why didn’t the generals take the intelligence seriously?
Because the intelligence was coming from women. They spoke about the outrage. Supposedly progressive, left-leaning generals snubbing intelligence reports coming from women. A “General” who is not a General over his ego is also not a General on the battlefield. On the topic of female soldiers, I told them about a female reservist I had met the week before at the same encampment moments after they were hit by a missile-caused rockslide. I told them about how disheveled she looked and mentioned that if I had been her officer I would have sent her home on R&R for a couple of weeks. They corrected my erroneous attitude telling me that, studies, and experience, show the opposite to be the correct approach. Sending her home would have taken her away from people with shared common experiences as well as instilling a “can’t do” attitude rather than a “can do” attitude.
Before sharing the following story, I share the following article which appeared recently on Israel National News:
Freed hostage Mia Schem: ‘I experienced hell. There are no innocent civilians in Gaza’
French-Israeli says she was instructed on what to say in videos; was held by a family that played mind games, withheld food, taunted her; man who operated on her arm told her ‘You’re not going home alive’
By 
AMY SPIRO and MICHAEL HOROVITZ
29 December 2023, 10:58 pm
Released hostage Mia Schem, 21, described going through “hell” while in the Gaza Strip in a pair of televised interviews that both aired on Friday evening.
Schem was shot in the arm and taken hostage from the Supernova music festival on October 7, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists burst into southern Israel, killing more than 1,200 people and dragging around 240 into Gaza. Some 360 partygoers were killed during the assault on the music festival, and another 36 were taken hostage.
She was released on November 30 after 54 days in captivity, reuniting with her family and loved ones, and undergoing extensive surgery and rehabilitation on her wounded arm.
Her family said she has since developed epilepsy, from the trauma and the lack of sleep during her eight weeks as a hostage in Gaza.
Schem spoke in depth for the first time about the experience to both Channel 12 and 13 news, recounting the moments she was taken hostage, the suffering and mental torture she endured in captivity, and the experience of coming back home.
“It’s important to me to reveal the real situation about the people who live in Gaza, who they really are, and what I went through there,” she told Channel 13 news. “I experienced hell. Everyone there are terrorists… there are no innocent civilians, not one,” she said. “[Innocent civilians] don’t exist.”
Schem recounted the first moments of her abduction on October 7. She said when the rockets started, she and her friend fled and got in her car. While she was driving, her friend screamed, “they’re shooting,” she recalled. “I hit the gas to try and pass them but they shot the tires and the car stopped.”
Then, she told Channel 12, a truck full of armed terrorists drove by, “and one of the Hamas members looked at me, and just shot me in the arm, at a very, very close range.”
After she was shot in the arm, she said, “I was on the floor, covered in blood, and I screamed, ‘I lost my hand, I lost my hand.’”
In front of her eyes, Hamas took her friend, Elia Toledano, captive to Gaza with his arms tied behind his back; his body was recovered by the IDF earlier this month and brought back to Israel.
Schem said she saw Hamas terrorists shooting any of the wounded who still appeared alive, so she tried to play dead, but her friend’s car was burning around her. She saw a man walking amid the cars, and thinking he was Israeli, shouted: “Help!” But he was a Hamas terrorist, who told her to get up.
He “started to touch me, in the upper part of my body,” gesturing toward her chest. “And I started to scream, to go crazy, amid the burning cars, the bodies.” Then the terrorist, she said, saw the situation with her arm and “recoiled, and stopped for a moment.”
“And then out of nowhere somebody grabbed me by my hair, pulled me into a car and drove me to Gaza,” she told Channel 12. She said she felt like “an animal at the zoo” and was held for some time by a family with young children who would open the door to the room where she was held just to stare at her.
During the journey to Gaza, she told Channel 13, she was “half-conscious. I didn’t understand what was going on. I just told myself that I didn’t want to die.”
She said when they arrived in Gaza, “they pulled me by my hair from the car, they threw me in some back room of some hospital.” There, she said, they “stretched out my arm, tied it up on a piece of plastic, and that’s how I was for three days.” She said she was “sure that they were going to amputate my arm.”
After three days, she said, she was told to get dressed in a hijab and she was taken to a surgery room, where she was operated on “without anesthesia, nothing,” she told Channel 12 news, although she said to Channel 13 that they “put me under,” without elaborating on how.
Schem said she didn’t see the face of the person who operated on her, but “he looked at me and he said, ‘You’re not going home alive.’”
A day after the surgery, she told Channel 13, she was forced to film a propaganda video which Hamas released a few days later: “They told me to say that they were taking care of me and treating me… You do what you’re told. You’re afraid to die.”
It was the first video of a live hostage in Gaza.
Schem said that during her time in captivity she changed her own bandages, cleaned her wounds and did physiotherapy on herself.
Then she was brought to be held in a family home, Schem told Channel 13, saying that the whole family was involved with Hamas, including the woman and children. “I began asking myself questions: Why am I in a family home? Why are there children here? Why is there a woman here?” she said.
She was kept in a room and was told she couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, couldn’t cry, couldn’t be seen, she recounted: “There’s a terrorist, who is watching you 24/7, who is raping you with his eyes… an evil stare. I was afraid of being raped. It was my biggest fear there.”
She said she did not shower the entire period in captivity, didn’t receive any medications or painkillers, and would receive food “sometimes.”
She told Channel 12 that as a hostage she feared “that at any moment something could happen suddenly, that they would touch me.”
She described a moment when one of the youngest children of the family entered her room, “opened a bag of sweets, closed it, came up next to me, opened the bag, closed it and then left.”
Schem said she felt only “pure hatred. There are no innocent citizens there. They’re families controlled by Hamas. They’re children who from the moment they are born, they teach them that Israel is Palestine and just to hate Jews.”
Schem said she believes the only reason her captor did not rape her is that “his wife and children were in the next room. His wife hated the fact that he was alone in the room with me. Hated it. So she would play games with me.”
His wife would bring her husband food, “and not bring me food,” she recounted. “A day, two days, three days, I wouldn’t eat… She was so terrible, she had mean eyes. She was a very evil woman.”
On one occasion, she said, “I was choking back tears,” and her captor looked at her and said “‘Enough, or I’ll send you to the tunnel.’”
Schem told Channel 13 that there was a television in the house, and at one point she saw her mother appear on TV, “and I saw my mother being strong, and I said ‘who am I to break?’”
Schem said the IDF airstrikes in Gaza were very close by where she was being held, shattering the windows. She said she experienced blast shock and “I couldn’t hear for three days.”
She continued to hope, however, that the army would rescue her, even waving her hands — with their distinctive tattoos — out of the bathroom window when she had a chance. But she said she was not afraid of the blasts, and “they made me feel good… that they didn’t forget me.”
At one point, she recounted to Channel 12, her captor was angry, upset, crying and told her that his two friends had been killed in Israeli airstrikes: “I was very satisfied” by the news, she said, “but I acted sad, I comforted him, I played the game.”
Schem said she was later moved from home to home — via ambulance — and once even cooked a meal for the four Hamas terrorists who were holding her hostage, “and I made them see me in a different light. To respect me. They appreciate women who cook, who clean.”
She said that four or five days before she was released — at the start of the weeklong truce — she was sent to the Hamas tunnels: “No air, no food, with an open wound.”
There, for the first time since she was abducted, she met a handful of other Israeli hostages. On the one hand, she told Channel 13, she was happy to see them, but she also felt that some of them “had already lost hope… it was hard to be optimistic.”
Repeatedly, she said, her captors would taunt her and lie that she was going to be released tomorrow, “to break you emotionally.” The next day, she said, instead of releasing her “they would say to me ‘you’re like Gilad Schalit, a year, two years, three years,” a reference to the IDF soldier captured in 2006 and released five years later, in 2011.
She told Channel 13 that she didn’t really believe she would be freed “until I got in the IDF vehicle, until I crossed the border into Israel.”
Right before she was handed over to the Red Cross, they “stuck a camera in my face and said ‘Say that we treated you nicely, that people in Gaza are nice and good.’ What else was I supposed to do?”
Schem told Channel 12 news that when she was released, leaving other hostages behind was “the hardest thing in the world.”
“They said to me, ‘Mia, please, make sure they don’t forget us.’ And I apologized that I was leaving,” she said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Schem, who is a French-Israeli dual national, was one of the 105 hostages freed during a Qatar-negotiated temporary ceasefire last month. An additional 129 people are believed to remain in Hamas captivity, including 23 bodies. Four hostages were released prior to that, and one was rescued by troops.
The bodies of 11 hostages have also been recovered, including three hostages who were mistakenly shot dead by IDF troops. Hamas is also holding the bodies of fallen IDF soldiers Oron Shaul and Hadar Goldin since 2014, as well as two Israeli civilians, Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, who are both thought to be alive after entering the Strip of their own accord in 2014 and 2015, respectively.
I traveled on and met a soldier with a long ponytail, beard, and wilderness-man-type hat. The kind of guy I’d see in Montana. This soldier was out of place in Israel. He looked like he should have been carrying a custom-built hunting rifle bedecked with elegant wood and Western-style engravings than a factory-built M-16. He was using an axe to chop wood for the stove and a hatchet to make kindle wood. The aroma and warmth of burning wood was a delight. We drank coffee, ate fresh malabi a woman from the moshav dropped off, and chatted for hours about whatever came to mind. Relationships, parenting, hunting, fishing, canoeing, music, healing, Jerry Garcia, and coffee. We spoke about why I come to visit the soldiers and the front. Among other reasons, it’s for the stories. I collect stories. And war is a great place to find a good story. We had a blast. He told me a story I will not forget. He said that as a young soldier, he served for a stint as a sniper. An order came in to kill a man from Gaza. He prepared his rifle and looked through the scope. Looking through the scope he saw a man who was speaking to himself, moving with the rigid, spastic movements of an active psychotic. Perhaps of a schizophrenic. The order came in over the radio to shoot. He answered back, “No. This man is a threat to no one but himself.” The reply, “That is not your decision to make. Your job is to pull the trigger.” He answered back, “Look general, I’m the one looking through the scope, not you. And I don’t see a man I can shoot. I see a man who is mentally ill.” The reply, “You are disobeying orders.” Thinking to himself that if he later finds out this man was innocent he would never forgive himself he answered back, “General! So be it!” (Top Brass later had the soldier investigated for refusing to follow orders. Top brass don’t like it when their brass don’t shine). The soldier told me that later that day the man was picked up by the Red Cross and taken to a psychiatric facility. Then, he said, almost wistfully, “Now, I would kill…without judgment…simply…Because the kill must be done…”
Friends, the war continues. Most soldiers now have everything they need in terms of tactical supplies and equipment. What they don’t have is peace of mind knowing that their wives are struggling both financially as well as with the children. We aren’t able to help with the children, but at least we can help provide them with food to eat, making sure that their pantries are full, and that their children have food in their stomachs. In the meantime, I go about my work of strengthening the morale of the soldiers on the Northern Front with Lebanon.
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Stay safe!
Binyamin Klempner
Thanks to Dr. Klempner for his regular updates.