During the days when Hamas was yet to release Israeli hostages, hope still flickered for Bipin Joshi, the 23-year-old Nepalese agriculture student who arrived in Israel just three weeks before the Hamas assault of October 7, 2023.
However, nearly two years later, that hope was extinguished when Hamas on Monday announced it had no more living hostages, and it was confirmed that Joshi, long believed to be alive, was among the dead.
Joshi’s story in Israel began with a dream of learning advanced farming techniques at Kibbutz Alumim in Israel, close to the Gaza border. He and 16 other Nepalese students had come to Israel seeking opportunities, not realising how close they were to the line of one of the most protracted conflicts.
When Hamas gunmen stormed
the kibbutz in Israel that morning, ten of his compatriots were killed.
The group had been photographed huddled with Thai workers in a shelter, moments before the attackers reached them.
According to the only Nepalese survivor, Himanchal Kattel, the militants threw a grenade inside, but Bipin caught it and hurled it away before it exploded, saving Kattel’s life.
Injured in the attack, Joshi was taken captive along with two Thai workers.
The last known image of him came from a kibbutz surveillance footage, his captors leading him toward Gaza. At the site where he was seized, residents of Alumim later planted a Nepalese flag.
For months, his family in western Nepal clung to fragments of information. His 17-year-old sister, Pushpa, would travel eight hours each way to Kathmandu to plead with officials for help.
In August, the family travelled to Israel, meeting Israeli President Isaac Herzog and joining vigils in Tel Aviv’s Hostage Square, holding a photograph of Bipin beside the portraits of other Israeli captives.
Their hopes briefly revived when a video surfaced showing Joshi alive in captivity, filmed around November 2023. However, no further proof of life followed.
In a widely shared social media video, Bipin Joshi could be heard saying that he belonged to Nepal, and that he had come to Israel 25 days before the beginning of the war.
Bipin Joshi’s family struggled so hard to get their son back.
He arrived in Israel 25 days before the massacre. The 23-year-old Hindu student from Nepal just wanted to study agriculture.
He wasn’t Israeli. He wasn’t Jewish. So the media won’t talk about him because that will… pic.twitter.com/2QrwLfLG8Q
— dahlia kurtz ✡︎ דליה קורץ (@DahliaKurtz) October 13, 2025
On Monday, as Hamas released 20 hostages under a new ceasefire deal that was meant to free all surviving captives, Israel confirmed that Joshi was not among them, and that his body had been recovered.
Before the news of his death, Joshi had been the only non-Israeli hostage believed to be alive in Gaza.
At his village in Nepal, a small shrine now bears his photograph and the flag of Nepal, a quiet reminder of courage and of a promise to return that was never fulfilled.
The war that began with Hamas’s October 7 assault, which killed some 1,200 people and saw 251 kidnapped, has since claimed more than 67,000 Palestinian lives, the Associated Press quoted Gaza’s Health Ministry.
Nearly 90 per cent of Gaza’s population has been displaced since the war.
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