The Gaza cease-fire agreement has raised hopes for the return of the kidnapped son 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.

The phone is never far from his hand now. And never silent. She is waiting for news of her son, Bipin Joshi, a 23-year-old Nepali agricultural student who was kidnapped by Hamas and taken to Gaza.

Whenever the phone rings, Mahananda, a local teacher, thinks it might bring news of Bipin, or even – his greatest hope – his son’s voice online.

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

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

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, the day before he was abducted.

He made sure she was eating well, and showed her the clothes she was wearing.

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

It was confirmation that he had been taken alive.

The BBC now understands that Bipin is still alive, but Israel’s ambassador to Nepal, Dhan Prasad Pandit, said he still had “no concrete information” about 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, close to the Indian border.

As of Thursday, officials said, they had heard nothing but headlines announcing a cease-fire agreement.

The news gave everyone renewed hope.

“I am sorry that I will message my mother today or tomorrow, I am free now and I will come home immediately,” said Padma.

But relief for the Joshi family, if it comes at all, will not be so quick.

Along with nine other foreign workers who remain hostage, Bipin is not expected to be released. ceasefire, 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, tears in her eyes.

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

Bipin was one of the Nepali students at the 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 the time, Mahananda knew nothing about the Hamas attack or the situation in Israel, and struggled to make sense of what he was hearing.

He would later learn that 10 Nepali students were killed in the attack, and that he—his son—appeared to have been taken hostage.

That sense of disconnect has persisted for 15 agonizing months, Mahananda and Padma said Thursday.

The pain of all the kidnapped families has been great, but for some far from Israel it has been an added sense of isolation.

“It’s been 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 had visited the village.

Mahananda painted a different picture, saying that at the beginning of the war the family received many visits from officials, but as it progressed they were left increasingly alone.

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

“Everything we know comes from the news.”

A spokesman for Israel’s president’s office, Isaac Herzog, who has been working with the families of the hostages for the past 15 months, said he treated all hostages equally, Israeli or foreign, and was working diligently to free them all. .

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

For others, like Joshi, all hope must be strained.

The longer they have to wait, the more likely it is that the cease-fire agreement will be breached.

At Bispuri’s home in Mahendranagar on Thursday, Bipin’s sister Puspa was holding her brother’s photo as she spoke.

Tears filled her eyes as she talked about coming home. He was sure he would.

“And when I see her again, I’ll hug her,” she said. “And cry.”