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The 21-year-old French tattoo artist abducted and wounded by Hamas terrorists said she’s convinced there’s only one reason she wasn’t raped by her captor during 54 hellish days in captivity.
“His wife was outside the room with the children,” freed hostage Mia Schem said during a newly released interview on Israeli TV. “That was the only reason he didn’t rape me.”
Schem, who has dual Israeli and French citizenship, said her tormentor kept her in a dark room under constant watch for most of her time in Gaza.
She said she was starved and taunted by the terrorist’s family while wondering if she’d be killed at any moment.
“[I was] closed in a dark room, not allowed to talk, not allowed to be seen, to be heard, hidden,” Schem told Israel’s Channel 13. “There is a terrorist looking at you 24/7, looking, raping you with his eyes.
“There is fear of being raped, there is fear of dying,” Schem said, at times bursting into tears while recounting the ordeal. “His wife hated the fact that he and I were in the same room. You feel like you want a hug, you know, woman to woman, to break down a bit.
“That’s all you had there. But she was so mean, she had such mean eyes.”
Schem was among more than 200 Israelis taken hostage during the Oct. 7 sneak attack by Hamas terrorists, who killed more than 1,200 people in the assault.
She was attending the Nova music festival near the border with the Gaza Strip when violent invaders went after the young Israeli festival-goers.
The 21-year-old was shot in the arm during the invasion.
Schem said she tried to flee, but that terrorists fired on her car and set it on fire, leaving her only two choices at the time.
“It was a split-second decision, whether to stay put and burn to death or go with him,” she said.
She was yanked onto a pickup truck and taken into Gaza, where she had a makeshift splint placed on her wounded arm.
She was then taken to a Palestinian home and held captive.
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At times Israeli bombs from a counter-offensive by the Jewish state rattled the home, and even shattered the windows at one point, she said in the television interview.
“I thought, ‘If I didn’t die on the 7th [of October], I’m going to die now,’ ” Schem said, but added that, “I trusted the military.”
In November, she was one of the hostages released during a brief cease-fire — but said she still bears the scars of her nightmare and disdain for those who took her freedom.
“It was important to me to relay the truth about the nature of the people who live in Gaza, who they truly are and what I experienced there,” she said in the interview.
“It is important to you that the world understands, what? That I went through a holocaust,” Schem added. “Everyone over there is a terrorist.”
With Post wires
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