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Several countries are grappling to find their missing and killed citizens in the latest Israel-Palestine war that has since Saturday claimed at least 1,600 lives, and is only expected to escalate. 

Ten Nepali students have been killed while 55 from Israeli bunkers and 72 from Lebanon have been shifted to safe places since the war broke out four days ago, Nepali Ambassador to Israel Kanta Rizal told ApEx over the phone. 

The ambassador also said that despite reports in some Nepali media regarding potential hostage-taking of Nepali citizens by the Hamas militants, there have been no official reports supporting these claims.  “We followed the reports of Nepalis being held hostage and relayed this information to Israeli officials, but there is no truth to these rumors,” said Rizal.

According to the diplomat, only one Nepali citizen is reported missing, and both the Nepali Embassy in Israel and Israeli authorities are actively searching for him.  The Nepali Ambassador informed that the southern region of Israel is where most of the clashes have been taking place, and there are no Nepalis in the zone and its immediate vicinities needing emergency rescue.

Around 4,500 Nepalis are currently employed as caregivers in Israel while 265 Nepali students are studying there as part of the Israeli government’s ‘Learn and Earn’ program. Among the students, 119 are from the Agriculture and Forestry University, 97 from Tribhuvan University, and 49 from Far-Western University (FWU). Seventeen students from FWU were employed at an agricultural farm in Alumim, located near the war-torn Gaza Strip.

Ten Nepali students enrolled in educational institutions in southern Israel lost their lives in a shock attack launched by the Hamas militants on Saturday. Fifty-five students were rescued from bunkers during the attack. The embassy has opened an online registration for those wishing to return to Nepal. Around 200 Nepalis have already filled out the form. 

Ambassador Rizal said that the embassy was facilitating the return of Nepali citizens. 

“We are in close coordination with both Nepali and Israeli authorities, and will expedite their return, along with the bodies of the deceased students,” she added.

Despite ministerial- and secretary-level discussions between both governments, there have been complaints that the rescue of Nepali citizens has been delayed.  But Rizal said that Israeli authorities themselves were facing challenges in rescuing their citizens from the war-zone region.

Meanwhile, the Israel Defense Forces have reported the elimination of a “number of armed suspects” who had “infiltrated” into Israel from Lebanon. This has raised concerns that Lebanon might be involved in the ongoing conflict.  However, Lebanese Prime Minister-designate Najib Mikati has stated that his country does not want to be drawn into the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas. 

In recent years, there have been several small-scale rocket attacks from Lebanon into Israel, leading to retaliatory strikes from Israel. These attacks were believed to be orchestrated by Palestinian factions in Lebanon.

Ambassador Rizal also reported that 72 Nepali students from Lebanon were successfully rescued and placed in a safe location. 

“I have received a message from Nepali students in Lebanon informing me that 72 of them have been relocated to a secure place,” she said, adding that the embassy in Israel was keeping a close eye on the situation of Nepali citizens both in Israel and Lebanon.“We are looking if there are other Nepalis stuck in Lebanon.”

Minister for Foreign Affairs NP Saud has advised against individual or political visits to Israel, except in cases where official decisions have been made at the political level. 

“The situation is sensitive, so people are urged not to visit Israel on a personal or political basis, unless there are official political decisions,” he told the Foreign Relations and Tourism Committee of the House of Representatives.

The government has decided to provide Rs 1m in relief to the families of Nepali students who lost their lives in Israel.

Government Spokesperson Rekha Sharma informed that an emergency meeting of the Council of Ministers on Monday decided to allocate the amount to the families of 10 Nepalis who were killed in Saturday’s Hamas attack on Israel. The meeting also resolved to find ways to relocate trapped Nepali citizens to safe areas.

Similarly, the government has declared a national mourning day on Tuesday. National flags will be hoisted at half-mast in all government offices and diplomatic missions of Nepal to mourn the victims. 

A rapid action team has been formed under the leadership of Foreign Minister NP Saud to rescue the Nepalis trapped in Israel. The team has decided to have an airplane on standby and establish coordination with the Israeli side to repatriate the bodies of Nepali students. 

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal spoke with a Nepali student hiding in a bunker following the attack. Dahal held a video call with Bipin Subedi, and assured that the government was doing its best to rescue all Nepali citizens from Israel at the earliest. 

Dahal’s personal secretary Ramesh Malla said that the prime minister told Subedi that the government has been making efforts to rescue Nepalis based in Israel for the past three days. 

“Conversations are happening at the foreign ministerial level, and regular talks are taking place with the Embassy of Israel,” Prime Minister Dahal told Subedi.

Prime Minister Dahal has instructed authorities concerned to understand the situation in Israel and to identify the deceased and bring their bodies to Nepal at the earliest. 

Malla said that there was a delay in evacuating the students hiding in bunkers, because the Israeli side considered it a security risk.

Social media posts and videos suggest that around 32 students from the war zone were taken to a safe place on Monday. The Israeli army has initiated the movement of students in Israel’s Sedot Negev to safe locations.

Meanwhile, the Sudurpaschim provincial government has also announced to provide Rs 200,000 each to the families of those students killed in Israel. In a statement issued on Monday, Chief Minister Kamal Bahadur Shah announced that the provincial government would provide support to the families of the deceased. He also requested the federal governments of both countries to conduct search and rescue efforts and assist in bringing back the bodies of Nepali students.

The opposition parties, CPN-UML and Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP), have asked Speaker Devraj Ghimire to pass a special resolution from Parliament to rescue Nepalis stuck in Israel. In a meeting held at Singha Durbar, the two parties emphasized that they would raise the Israel issue intensively in the Parliament through adjournment motions, motions of public importance, or resolution motions.

UML Chief Whip Padam Giri urged the government to take a serious interest in the situation of the 10 Nepalis who were killed in the Hamas attack, emphasizing that the condition of other Nepalis there is critical.

Nepali Congress MP Arjun Narsingha KC also strongly demanded that the government immediately bring home the bodies of the students who died in Israel. 

Addressing the Parliament session on Monday, KC urged the government to promptly repatriate the bodies of the 10 Nepali students. He also asked the government to ascertain the number of Nepalis in Israel and inform Parliament. 

“We have received news that about 123,000 people have been displaced in Israel. The details of how many Nepalis are among them should be presented to the Parliament,” he said.

Several other parliamentarians, including Gokul Prasad Baskota, Ishwar Bahadur Rijal, Chitra Bahadur KC, Anjani Shrestha, Anisha Nepali, Abdul Khan, Amanlal Modi, Amar Bahadur Raymajhi, Amrit Lal Rajbanshi, Ishwari Gharti, Urmila Majhi, Kiran Kumar Shah and Geeta Basnet, also demanded for a prompt rescue of the Nepali citizens from Israel. 

Late on Monday, Prime Minister Dahal called an all-party meeting where he requested parties stand united on the Israel incident. One of the leaders in the meeting said all  parties share a unified stance on the issue of Israel. “The cross-party leaders suggested that the government provide  accurate and timely information about the state of Nepali there,” he told ApEx.

Janakpur youth killed after leaving for Israel just 26 days ago

Family members of Anand Sah have been devastated after he was killed along with nine other Nepalis in Saturday’s Hamas attack on Israel. 

The 25-year-old from Laxminiya Rural Municipality, Dhanusha, had left for Israel just 26 days ago. Eldest among four siblings, Anand was his family’s only support.  

His parents Soman and Shuvakala, and sisters, Sunita, Saraswati and Aarati are inconsolable. Neighbors and relatives have gathered at their house to comfort them, but to no avail.

Soman and Shuvakala have been drifting in and out of consciousness. When they come to their senses, they cry out for their deceased son. “Where did you go? Why don’t you come back? Who is going to look after us?” 

Neighbor Mithilesh Sah says Anand’s death has dealt an immeasurable blow to his family.

“Anand was the eldest of the four children and the only son to his parents. So his father and mother had high hopes for him,” says Mithilesh, recalling how Soman had worked in the Persian Gulf for 10 years so that Anand could go to school. 

Despite a poor family background, Anand was able to attend a boarding school and study science at Mithila College. Neighbors and friends remember Anand as a diligent student

“His parents had sacrificed a lot to educate him,” says Mithilesh. “One can only imagine what they must be going through after their son’s tragic death.” 

Anand had last talked with his sisters over the phone on Friday. He could not speak with his parents that day. Soman and Shuvakala tried contacting Anand on Saturday, but they could not get hold of him. There was a ringing tone, but no answer. 

Without warning on Saturday, Gaza’'s militant Hamas rulers attacked Israel by air, land and sea. Millions of Israelis in the country’s south awoke to the searing sound of incoming rockets and the inevitable thud of impact. Air raid sirens wailed as far north as Tel Aviv. Israel’s anti-rocket interceptors thundered in Jerusalem.

And in an unprecedented escalation, armed Hamas fighters blew up parts of Israel’s highly fortified separation fence and strode into Israeli communities along the Gaza frontier, terrorizing residents and trading fire with Israeli soldiers.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right allies were scrambling to respond to the rapidly changing events. Within just nine hours, some 40 Israelis and nearly 200 Palestinians were confirmed dead, with the numbers expected to rise.

Here are some key takeaways from the multi-pronged attack that has suddenly plunged Israel into war.

Israel caught unaware

The shock that Israelis felt on Saturday morning—on Simchat Torah, one of the most joyous days of the Jewish calendar—recalled the surprise of the 1973 Mideast war. Practically 50 years earlier to the day, a full-scale Egyptian-Syrian attack on a Jewish holiday quickly turned into a disaster for an unprepared Israeli military.

Then, as now, Israelis had assumed that their intelligence services would be able to alert the army to any major attack or invasion well in advance. That colossal failure still haunts the legacy of then-Prime Minister Golda Meir and helped bring down the lengthy rule of the once-dominant Labor Party.

Now, the question of how the militants were able to stage such a huge and coordinated attack—which has already killed more Israelis than any single assault since the second Palestinian uprising two decades ago—without triggering Israeli intelligence concerns has already presented a major challenge to Netanyahu’s ultranationalist government.

The government’s supporters had expected Netanyahu and powerful hard-line ministers with a history of anti-Arab rhetoric like National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir to take a particularly belligerent stance against the Palestinians and respond more forcefully to threats from militants in Gaza.

As political analysts lambast Netanyahu over the failure, and the casualty count climbs, Netanyahu risks losing control of both his government and the country.

Unprecedented infiltration

Hamas claimed its fighters had taken several Israelis captive in the enclave, releasing gruesome videos of militants dragging bloodied soldiers across the ground and standing over dead bodies, some of them stripped to their underwear. It said that senior Israeli military officers were among the captives.

The videos could not immediately be verified but matched geographic features of the area. Fears that Israelis had been kidnapped evoked the 2006 capture of soldier Gilad Shalit, whom Hamas-linked militants seized in a cross-border raid. Hamas held Shalit for five years until he was exchanged for over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

In a dramatic escalation unseen in decades, Hamas also sent paragliders flying into Israel, the Israeli military said. The brazen attack recalled a famous assault in the late 1980s when Palestinian militants crossed from Lebanon into northern Israel on hang-gliders and killed six Israeli soldiers.

The Israeli army belatedly confirmed that soldiers and civilians had been taken hostage in Gaza, but refused to provide further details.

A dangerous gamble by Hamas

Hamas officials cited long-simmering sources of tension between Israel and the Palestinians, including the dispute around the sensitive Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, which is sacred to both Muslims and Jews and remains at the emotional heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Competing claims over the site, known to Jews as the Temple Mount, have spilled into violence before, including a bloody 11-day war between Israel and Hamas in 2021.

In recent years, Israeli religious nationalists—such as National Security Minister Ben-Gvir—have increased their visits to the compound. Last week, during the Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot, hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jews and Israeli activists visited the site, prompting condemnation from Hamas and accusations that Jews were praying there in violation of the status quo agreement.

Hamas statements have also cited the expansion of Jewish settlements on lands that the Palestinians claim for a future state and Ben-Gvir’s efforts to toughen restrictions on Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

More recently, tensions have escalated with violent Palestinian protests along the Gaza frontier. In negotiations with Qatar, Egypt and the United Nations, Hamas has pushed for Israeli concessions that could loosen the 17-year blockade on the enclave and help halt a worsening financial crisis that has sharpened public criticism of its rule.

Some political analysts have linked Hamas’ attack to ongoing US-brokered talks on normalization of ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia. So far, reports of possible concessions to Palestinians in the negotiations have involved Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, not Gaza.

“We have always said that normalization will not achieve security, stability, or calm,” Bassem Naim, a senior Hamas official, told the AP.

Israel in crisis

The eruption of violence comes at a difficult time for Israel, which is facing the biggest protests in its history over Netanyahu’s proposal to weaken the Supreme Court while he is on trial for corruption.

The protest movement, which accuses Netanyahu of making a power grab, has bitterly divided Israeli society and unleashed turmoil within the Israeli military. Hundreds of reservists have threatened to stop volunteering to report for duty in protest at the judicial overhaul.

Reservists are the backbone of the country’s army, and protests within the army ranks have raised concerns about the military’s cohesion, operational readiness and power of deterrence as it confronts threats on multiple fronts. Netanyahu on Saturday called up “an extensive mobilization of reserve forces.”

A perilous cycle

Israel and Hamas have fought four wars and exchanged fire numerous times since the Islamic militant group seized control of Gaza from forces loyal to the Palestinian Authority in 2007. Cease-fires have stopped major fighting in past rounds of conflict but have always proven shaky.

Each agreement in the past has offered a period of calm, but the deeper, underlying issues of the conflict are rarely addressed and set the stage for the next round of airstrikes and rockets.

With its increased leverage in this round, Hamas is likely to push harder for concessions on key issues, such as easing the blockade and winning the release of prisoners held by Israel.

AP

The militant Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip have launched an unprecedented, multifront attack on Israel, firing thousands of rockets. Dozens of Hamas fighters infiltrated the heavily fortified border at several locations, catching the country off-guard during a major holiday. Israel has reported at least 40 casualties while other international media say the death toll has reached 100.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Israel was ‘at war’ and called for a mass mobilization of army reserves.

The Nepali government has strongly condemned the ‘terrorist attack’ in Israel that left nine Nepalis injured. “At this critical hour, we express our solidarity with the Government of Israel,” stated the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The Nepali government extended heartfelt condolences and deepest sympathies to the people and Government of Israel, as well as to the victims of this cruel attack and their families. “We wish for a speedy recovery of the injured,” added the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The Nepali government received information that a farm where 14 Nepalis were working came under attack. Nine Nepalis have been reported injured, with two of them in serious condition.

The Embassy of Nepal in Israel is in close communication with the Nepalis living in the affected areas. The Embassy is also in contact and coordination with Israeli authorities to ensure the safety, security, and rescue of the Nepalis, as well as providing medical treatment for the injured, officials say.

Given the situation, Nepali nationals in Israel are urged to remain cautious and follow the safety measures advised by the authorities, the Ministry stated.

American President Joe Biden has strongly condemned the “appalling assault against Israel by Hamas terrorists from Gaza” and mentioned that he has spoken with Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu.

In a statement released by the White House, Biden conveyed to the Israeli leader that “we stand ready to offer all appropriate means of support to the Israeli government and the Israeli people”. Biden also emphasized that the Jewish state “has a right to defend itself and its people”. He warned against any other party hostile to Israel seeking advantage in this situation.

The president underscored that his administration’s support for Israel’s security is “rock solid and unwavering”.

Various other Western leaders also condemned the Hamas attack and expressed their support for Israel.

Contact

Nepal Embassy in Israel: +972(0)35168085

Amb Kanta Rizal: +972545864423

1st Secy Arjun Ghimire: +972528289300

Email: [email protected]