A family giftIn a remote village in western Nepal, thousands of miles from Israel, Mahananda Joshi sat restlessly at home on Thursday, phone in hand.
The phone is now not far from his hand. And never in silence. 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 deepest 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 Israelis when Hamas attacked on October 7, 2023.
Twenty-four were later released – 23 from Thailand and one from the Philippines – but Bipin and nine others remained.
It was never clear why.
The last time Bipin’s mother Padma spoke to him was on October 6, she said, the day before he was abducted.
He assured her that she was eating well and showed her the clothes she was wearing.
The next time the family saw him was a video taken from Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, which Israeli officials showed them, asking them to identify him.
It was confirmation that he was caught 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 no “concrete information” yet on Bipin’s condition or whereabouts.
A family giftMahananda, 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 headlines announcing a cease-fire agreement.
The news gave them all renewed hope.
“I feel like mom will text me today or tomorrow, I’m free now and I’ll be right back home,” Padma said.
But relief for the Joshi family, if it comes, will not be so quick.
‘Everything could fall apart’
Along with nine other foreign workers who remained hostages, Bipin is not expected to be released in the first phase cease-fire, 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 could fall apart,” Padma said with tears in her eyes.
The family ordeal began on the day of the attack.
Bipin was one of a handful of Nepalese students in kibbutzim in southern Israel that day, and Mahananda, a teacher at a local school, received a call from one of them saying that Bipin had been kidnapped.
At that moment, Mahananda knew nothing about the Hamas attack or the situation unfolding in Israel, and struggled to make sense of what he heard.
He would later learn that 10 Nepalese students had been killed in the attack, and that one – his son – appeared to have been taken hostage.
That feeling of disconnection has lasted for 15 agonizing months, Mahananda and Padma said on Thursday.
The pain of each hostage’s family was great, but for some of those who were 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 was 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 had many visits from officials, but as it progressed, 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.”
The spokesman for the Israeli president’s office, Isaac Herzog, who has worked with the families of the hostages for the past 15 months, said that all hostages are treated the same, whether Israeli or foreign, and that he is working diligently to free them.
For some families, the news of the ceasefire gives hope that their 15-month ordeal is coming to an end and that they will see their loved ones again in a few weeks.
For others, like the Joshis, any hope must be tempered.
The longer they have to wait, the more likely it is that the ceasefire deal could collapse.
At home in Bispuri Mahendranagar on Thursday, Bipin’s sister Puspa held a photograph of her brother as she spoke.
Tears filled her eyes when she talked about his coming home. She was convinced that he would.
“And when I see him again, I will hug him,” she said. – And cry.