The two-year-long bloody war in Gaza is coming to a substantive end after a deal between Israel and Hamas. On Monday, all the living (around 18) and dead hostages (around 30) will be freed by Hamas later in the week. Israel has already halted its aggressive military operation in Gaza and is working out the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners. US President Donald Trump certainly played the key role, and he deserves full credit. There will be an anxious wait for the release of one non-Israeli-non-Jew captive from Gaza – Bipin Joshi of Nepal.
One doesn’t know whether he will be walking out alive or in a coffin. The New York Times published a list of hostages, and Joshi’s name is on it, but in another instance, when Benjamin Netanyahu spoke and enlisted them at the UN last month, his name was not among the living hostages.
Joshi is a 23-year-old agriculture student from Nepal who travelled to Israel in September 2023 to pursue training in agriculture. He was part of a group of 17 students selected by the Embassy of Israel in Nepal for its flagship “Learn and Earn” programme in Kathmandu. The students were placed at Kibbutz Alumim, a farming community on the Gaza border. It was here, on 7 October 2023, that Hamas launched its brutal attack—killing indiscriminately, whether Israelis, foreign students, Thai workers, or local residents. At Alumim alone, Hamas murdered 22 Israelis and another 35 in the surrounding area.
A brave friend
That morning, Joshi and his Nepali friends first sheltered in their apartments as sirens wailed and gunfire grew louder. Believing the bunkers would be safer, they moved there after a few hours. But Hamas militants reached the bunkers too. Ten of the Nepali students were executed, others were left critically wounded, and Joshi was reportedly dragged into Gaza.
Those who survived later wrote harrowing accounts of that day—and of Joshi’s courage. One survivor, Birendra Chaudhary, recalled how Joshi saved lives by throwing a grenade back out of the bunker. But the gunfire drew closer. “One of our friends near the door was shot in the leg. Another tried to explain we were Nepalis, hoping they would show mercy, but he too was shot dead,” Chaudhary wrote. That brief attempt at human appeal was answered with bullets. For two years, Joshi’s family and friends in Nepal and Israel have lived with anguish, uncertain whether he remains alive in Gaza or among the dead hostages. Captivity in tunnels, relentless bombing, starvation, and utter devastation of human life in Gaza make either possibility equally cruel. Why Hamas chose to kill unarmed Nepali students—or to keep Joshi in captivity—remains unfathomable.
In August 2025, the student’s mother, 48-year-old Padma Joshi, and his 17-year-old sister Pushpa, travelled to Israel to meet President Isaac Herzog. They joined Israel’s Hostage Families Forum, standing shoulder to shoulder in weekly protests in Tel Aviv. They were in New York for the UN General Assembly, appealing to the world on Joshi’s behalf last month. But their efforts remained fruitless. Nepal’s political crisis has left its government inward-looking and weak, unable to mobilise Arab states like Qatar, Egypt, or Turkey to exert pressure on Hamas.
“My son has no side in this war. He is an innocent student. Our humble request to Hamas is to let him go,” Padma pleaded in an interview. But Hamas spared no one on 7 October—children, women, the elderly. To expect compassion from them now is perhaps in vain.
The scale of the killings had shocked the world, but one part of that horror remains underreported: the killing of migrant workers and students. Human Rights Watch documented the deaths of 32 Thai farmworkers, four Filipino caregivers, one Cambodian student, and ten Nepali students—including Joshi’s companions. Hamas killed these non-Jews, non-Israelis with full knowledge of who they were. There was no military purpose, no political logic—only violence for the sake of violence. This was not resistance; it was insanity.
Israeli media reports later revealed that some Hamas militants carried Captagon, an amphetamine-like drug that numbs fear and heightens aggression. Dubbed “the poor man’s cocaine,” Captagon has long been linked to Syrian warlords, Hezbollah, and Iranian-backed militias. It may explain, though not excuse, the unhinged brutality of that day.
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Beyond ideological side-taking
October 7 is not over; it is going to linger on for years and may return in the form of another episode of violence and war. Israel’s unrelenting bombardment has devastated Gaza, killing thousands of civilians. Whether Hamas will disarm itself as agreed in the current deal remains one of the most complex aspects for the near future. The right-wing government of Israel also doesn’t leave one with much assurance of co-existence and dialogue for long; now it is taking this deal under the direct dictate of Donald Trump. The world seeks stability through this ceasefire, but the radical groups like Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the far-Right government of Israel may not be restrained by external forces.
One truth must not be lost in the politics of this conflict and selective usage of facts by ideologically driven sides: Hamas did not only kill Israelis on October 7. It also killed foreign students who had no part in this war. Their deaths expose a cruelty that cannot be dressed up as “resistance.”
The world rarely speaks of them. When the conflict is narrated, it is the Israelis and Palestinians who fill the frame, while the forgotten foreigners—like Bipin Joshi—are left on the margins. But their lives matter. Their families grieve no less. Their stories demand recognition. Until the hostages are freed and Israel’s retaliation stops, 7 October remains unfinished business—not only for Israelis, not only for Gazans, but for the world that chooses sides and selective silence about the foreigners who were caught in the crossfire and then erased from memory.
Khinvraj Jangid is Director and Professor, Centre for Israel Studies, OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat. He is Comper Fellow at The Elizabeth and Tony Comper Center for the Study of Antisemitism, University of Haifa, Israel. Views are personal.