Mia Schem was attending the Nova rave in the desert near the Gaza border on Oct. 7 when Hamas fighters staged their surprise attack. Their rampage through small communities and the music festival killed more than 1,200 people, sparking an unforgiving Israeli bombing campaign and ground invasion in which more than 11,000 people have been killed and much of Gaza destroyed.

Mia was one of some 240 individuals abducted that day and taken to Gaza. Now, a month later, the hostages’ families are living with the terrible knowledge that their loved ones are the one slim sliver of humanity that has had to endure the violence and trauma of both Oct. 7 and its aftermath.

The Schems are French Israeli, and so Mia’s mother, Keren, has met with senior French officials, including President Emmanuel Macron. And yet, she says that mostly when she goes to bed at night, she worries that the hostages are slipping from the world’s attention.

“She is loyal, she is warm, and she is something like the rock of our family,” Keren says of Mia. “And I know these are the things any mother would say,” she adds, “so I ask every mother, every father, every sister … brother, ‘Just think about it for one minute; think about [the hostages] like they are your own.’”

Keren Schem rubs two fingers over the tiny-script Hebrew tattoo that encircles her wrist like a bracelet, and offers her best English translation.

“You are the only star in the sky, you are bright and shiny,” she says. Still looking down at the words her fingers caress, she says, “Every day I am praying to God that Mia is seeing a star in the sky.”

Keren Schem is the mother of Mia Schem, one of the estimated 239 hostages that Hamas, the militant organization that rules the Gaza Strip, is presumed still to be holding captive in Gaza.

Mia was attending the Nova rave in the desert near the Gaza border on Oct. 7 when Hamas fighters staged their surprise cross-border attack. They rampaged through small communities and the music festival, killing more than 1,200 Israelis and other nationals, and wounding and sexually assaulting many more.

Then there was the unprecedented mass abduction of hostages back to Gaza, all, like Mia, the bright and shiny lights of some family somewhere, but mostly, like the Schems, in Israel.

The Hamas attack sparked an unforgiving Israeli bombing campaign and ground invasion in which more than 11,000 people have been killed and much of Gaza, an area the size of Delaware that 2.3 million Palestinians call home, destroyed.