Each day, they wonder if he is alive or dead. If his captors feed him. If he has clothes. If he worries that, after more than 700 days, his family has given up hope.
For nearly two years, the family of Bipin Joshi, a Nepali student who was abducted by Hamas from a southern Israeli settlement on Oct. 7, 2023, has waged a desperate campaign to bring him home to a remote Himalayan village thousands of miles from Israel and Gaza.
But after violent anticorruption protests erupted in Nepal and toppled the government in September, the diplomatic effort to free Mr. Joshi has been tossed into uncertainty. Newly installed leaders in Kathmandu are scrambling to fill empty ministries and rebuild a state from scratch.
Now, a two-day revolution in Nepal and a two-year war in the Middle East are converging on Mr. Joshi’s case, and an abduction that has flickered in the public consciousness has become even more grave.
“Every day, I think about him, praying to God to save his life,” his mother, Padma Joshi, 48, said in an interview on Wednesday with The New York Times. “He has no side in this war. He is an innocent foreign student. Our humble request to Hamas is to let him go, my son.”
In 2023, Mr. Joshi, then 23, left Nepal to study and work in a rural area of Israel, Kibbutz Alumim, close to the Gaza border. Less than three weeks into his time there, according to Israeli officials, Hamas gunmen stormed a dairy barn where his family said he was sheltering, slaughtering dozens in the settlement and taking him hostage.
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The post The Desperate Campaign to Bring Home Hamas’s Only Nepali Hostage appeared first on New York Times.
