Gaza cease-fire agreement sparks hope for hostage’s son to return to Nepal

In a remote village in western Nepal, thousands of kilometers from Israel, Mahananda Joshi sat restlessly at home on Thursday, phone in hand.

Now the phone is never far from his hand. And never silently. He is waiting for news about his son, Bipin Joshi, a 23-year-old Nepalese agriculture student who was kidnapped by Hamas and taken to Gaza.

Every time the phone rings, Mahananda, a local teacher, thinks it might bring news of Bipin or even – his best hope – his son’s voice on the line.

“Unfortunately, it’s always someone else,” Mahananda said.

Bipin was one of dozens of foreign workers kidnapped along with the Israelis when Hamas attacked on October 7, 2023.

Twenty-four were subsequently released – 23 from Thailand and one from the Philippines – but Bipin and nine others remained.

It never became clear why.

Bipin’s mother, Padma, last spoke to him on October 6, she said, a day before he was abducted.

He assured her that he was eating well and showed her the clothes he was wearing.

The next time the family saw him was on a video taken from Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, shown to them by Israeli officials who asked them to identify him.

This was the confirmation that he was captured alive.

The BBC now understands that Bipin is believed to still be alive, but Nepal’s ambassador to Israel, Dhan Prasad Pandit, said there was still no “concrete information” on Bipin’s condition or whereabouts.

Mahananda, Bipin’s mother Padma and 18-year-old sister Puspa live in a small white one-story house in the village of Bispuri Mahendranagar, near the border with India.

As of Thursday, they had heard nothing from officials, they said, only the headlines reporting a cease-fire agreement.

The news gave them new hope.

“I feel he will text me today or tomorrow saying, mom, I’m free now and I’ll come home right away,” Padma said.

But the Joshi family’s relief, if it comes, will not be so quick.

Along with the other nine foreign workers who remain hostages, Bipin is not expected to be released in the first phase of the truce which will prioritize the release of elderly men, women and children.

The fear for the family is that while they wait, everything can change.

“Everything can fall apart,” Padma said with tears in her eyes.

The family’s ordeal begins on the day of the attack.

Bipin was one of several Nepali students in kibbutzim in southern Israel that day, and Mahananda, a teacher at a local school, received a call from one of them to say that Bipin had been kidnapped.

At this point, Mahananda knew nothing of the Hamas attack, nor of the situation unfolding in Israel, and he struggled to make sense of what he was hearing.

He would later learn that 10 Nepali students had been killed in the attack and that one – his son – appeared to have been taken hostage.

This feeling of disconnection has lasted for 15 agonizing months, Mahananda and Padma said on Thursday.

The pain of each hostage family was great, but for some of those far from Israel there was an added sense of isolation.

“It was a very lonely experience,” Mahananda said.

Mr Pandit, Nepal’s ambassador to Israel, told the BBC he had been in regular contact with the family and visited the village.

Mahananda painted a slightly different picture, saying that at the beginning of the war the family did receive many visits from officials, but as it dragged on, they were increasingly left alone.

“Since the new ceasefire agreement, no one has come to see us or communicate with us at all,” he said.

“Everything we know comes from the news.

A spokesman for Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s office, which has been working with hostage families for the past 15 months, said it treats all hostages the same, whether Israeli or foreign, and is working diligently to free them all.

For some of the families, news of the ceasefire brings hope that their 15-month ordeal is coming to an end and they will see their loved ones again in weeks.

For others, like Joshi, any hope must be tempered.

The longer they have to wait, the more likely the ceasefire agreement will fall apart.

At her home in Bispuri Mahendranagar on Thursday, Bipin’s sister Puspa held a picture of her brother as she spoke.

Her eyes welled up with tears as she spoke of his homecoming. She was confident he would.

“And when I see him again, I’m going to hug him,” she said. — And cry.