Former Israeli hostage – who underwent surgery in Gaza at the hands of a veterinarian while being held captive — Hamas is in New York on a mission.

Tattoo artist Mia Schem, who has French and Israeli citizenship, told the Post she would not find peace until the remaining 101 hostages return home.

“I have to fight for the rest of the hostages – this is my life,” said Schem, 22, released on November 30, 2023 in the first hostage deal after serving 54 years. horrible days in the hands of terrorists.

“I feel like I have a mission: to speak, to tell the world my story, for the other hostages who cannot do it,” she said. “And be the voice of the girls who are still here.”

“My body is here,” she lamented, “but my heart is still here, in Gaza. My soul is still in Gaza.

Schem and his friend Elia Toledano were among those kidnapped Oct. 7 at the Tribe of Nova music festival. Schem was also shot in the right arm.

In the first video released by Hamas a week later, she was shown with bandages wrapped around her arm after a three-hour surgery. During his captivity, the wound radiated pain, Schem said: but his captors didn’t lift a finger to help him.

“They didn’t give me any pain medication – nothing,” she said.

“My hand wasn’t connected to my body and she didn’t help me,” Schem said of her captor’s wife. “I think it’s a woman, that there would be humanity.”

At one point, her captor took her out of her dark room just so she could see her mother pleading on television for her daughter’s return.

“He told me: ‘Come and see, it’s the last time you see her. You will not return to Israel,” Schem recalled, adding that he was regularly told to study the Quran.

“They told me all the time: ‘You’ll stay here, you’ll get married here.’ They tried to break my spirit, to make me weak inside.

Most haunting for Schem is the unknown fate of the young women hostages held at the whim of their Hamas captors.

“In my last five days, they took me into the tunnels, where I met five other girls,” she said of the situation. dark cage less than five feet high where she and the others languished. There, Schem heard details of the horrors of other women’s kidnappings.

When her captor told Schem she needed to be released, the other hostages pleaded with her.

“They say, ‘Please, this is my full name, tell my family. Don’t forget us,'” she recalls with a shudder, adding that she has “an image stuck in my brain, that I’m leaving the other girls there.”

“I’m here in New York and they’re still there – in the tunnels,” she said.

She is not only tormented physically by her nightmarish ordeal, but emotionally as well.

“I can’t be in a closed room without air. I can’t breathe even now,” she said. “I think about them all the time.”

Schem recalled her ordeal while attending a conference organized by Shurat HaDinalso known as the Israel Law Center, in Midtown.

She has undergone two “complicated” surgeries since her release, the first to repair some of the damage inflicted on her arm in Gaza and the second to repair damaged nerves and shorten her hand.

While pleading for the remaining hostages, Schem awaits further procedures to repair the extensive damage to his arm.

Life since his return has been difficult.

It was during her second operation that she discovered Toledano’s body. had been sent back to Israel.

“It was very devastating,” said Keren, Schem’s mother.

Two days later, Schem had his first ever epileptic seizure.

“It lasted 10 minutes and it was the scariest thing I have ever seen,” Keren said, emphasizing that there was no family history of the disease. “It happened because she didn’t eat or sleep in captivity, maybe an hour a day and barely ate or drank anything.

“All the stress, fear and pain was inside, it all ended with the seizure,” Keren said, adding that Mia now takes pills twice a day to manage her illness.

“This seizure is the result of everything she has been through – physically and emotionally.”

Her advocacy mission in New York isn’t exactly what she imagined while touring the Big Apple.

“Before October 7, my dream was to be in New York, to be in America and to travel,” she said, emphasizing that she is here for all the wrong reasons. “And now, in New York, I don’t feel New York anymore.

“I can’t heal because there are still hostages there,” she said on the 390th day since the attacks. “A minute is like a lifetime.”