Eleven Friends We Couldn't Save: A Rescue Operation in Israel

Ten of my friends were shot dead. Four are still in Israeli hospitals. One was dragged away by Hamas; he was Bipin Joshi. This is what actually happened during the seven days that broke us: we waited under a table to die. "We waited for the missile to land on our heads"

The call that broke the morning.

It was Saturday morning we were sleeping in peace. It was a holiday. At 7:18 am, my phone was ringing, and I almost let it ring out. Usually, the morning call was the time when I didn’t prefer to answer.

For some reason, I answered.

My friend's voice came through first, and it wasn't a voice, not really; it was panic wearing the shape of words. Half-dressed. Barefoot. Behind him, through the phone, I heard something my brain refused to process for a second: gunfire. Real gunshots, cracking through a speaker into my quiet room in Kadesh Barnea.

"What happened?! Where are you?" - I asked him "We're in a bunker."

"What's happening?" - Again, I asked him

"There's a war outside. We don't know if we're going to survive this."

Then, his family called him, and we got disconnected. That was a short conversation, but it was the most unexpected conversation till now.

The Sky Was Full of Rockets

I shook 49 of my friends out of their beds. We didn't understand yet what was happening. We just knew it was happening, and we were safe till then. We stepped outside and looked up, and the sky that had been ordinary the night before was streaked with rockets and missiles, trails of smoke and fire crossing each other above our heads.

We were standing in a farming community in the desert of Israel, and also near a nuclear facility. So the question wasn't abstract. It was specific, and it was terrifying: What happens if one of these missiles is aimed at us?

We called our farm owner. He told us we were in one of the safest places in the country, that Israel would do everything to protect that zone. It was meant to be reassuring. It didn't feel reassuring. Reassurance doesn't mean much when you can still hear explosions.

Then the phone rang again. And this time, it gutted me.

Nepali students. Dead. In Israel. No names yet, no confirmation, just enough horror to make the floor tilt under me.

Fourteen of our friends were gunned down directly in that gunfire. Ten of them died in those first horrific hours. The other four survived, but they were hit hard; heavily injured, and even now they remain in Israeli hospitals, undergoing treatment. And one more friend, in that same chaos, was grabbed and dragged off by Hamas. Taken. Gone. No information, no contact, just absence where a person used to be.

Building a Rescue Operation

There was no time to grieve. Grief is a luxury for later. Right now, there were 262 Nepali students scattered across a war zone, while official processes moved painfully slowly, and my friends were crying into the phone from inside bunkers.

So we stopped waiting for permission and built our own operation.

I called everyone I could reach, and we split the work between us. Dharma took charge of tracking down the exact situation of every single Nepali student in the country, building a map, location by location, name by name. Anish became our contact person to the military, feeding the friends' location data directly to an army contact so that the people with the actual power to extract students would know exactly where to go. And I ran the operations center itself; the hub everything passed through, keeping the embassy, university families back home, and every scattered group of students connected, so that no one fell through the cracks.

I got in contact with the Nepali ambassador. I wrote a formal letter demanding an immediate response and posted it publicly, addressed to our Prime Minister. I had to do that because quiet channels weren't moving fast enough, and I was done waiting politely while my friends cried in bunkers on the phone with me. I also coordinated with our supervisor, Jessica, with Anish, Dharma, and Subash, with the embassy pulling together every thread we had into one plan: bring every Nepali student we could reach to our location in Kadesh Barnea first, consolidate, then move as one group.

At the same time, I started a social media campaign, because if the system wouldn't move on its own, maybe public pressure would. And it worked. Journalists started paying attention. Our story started spreading. Within two days, we had pulled most of our scattered students into one place.

For a moment, it felt like things were turning.

Then Nepal told us there was no flight permit to operate in Israeli airspace, and our own officials assumed wrongly, and without even trying, that permission would never come. We pushed back. We insisted they ask anyway.

Israel said yes.

Then came the next problem: the only plane available for the rescue was an old one, one of the last two aircraft of its kind still flying before being grounded for good. That plane was what we had. That plane was what we waited for.

When we were gathering our friends from different zones, our friend Mamta Sinjali and others were also supposed to rescue on that day, and the rescue bus had reached their place. I was in regular contact with them till that time. I was mentally fatigued, so as soon as we heard that the rescue bus reached them, my friend invited me to get some fresh air and play football. So, I went to play football, but after 10 minutes, my phone rang. I picked up the phone, and it was from Mamta. She said that the rescue bus had left, and they were not picked up. They told them they were supposed to be rescued another day, and Mamta had also added to me that the place was in danger and did not know what would happen that night.

So, without any delay, I again try to connect with Jessica and the army team to rescue the remaining Nepali there. I also added their vulnerability and mental state to them, highlighting that they were supposed to get rescued that day. They ask me to hold for some minutes to find a rescue team. I waited for the phone call. After 15 minutes, they again called me and said the rescue bus was heading to their place. I thank her and again call Mamta to get ready. After 30 minutes, the rescue team reached them, and they were rescued from that bunker and were safely relocated to the hotel.

The Night We Hid Under Tables, Waiting to Die

We were spending the final night with a hope. We started to sing Dashain songs as the festival was nearer in a place that had given us nothing but fear for 6 days, because for the first time, we had hope. Tomorrow, we are going home.

And then the siren blew.

We had no bunker in our area. None. So when that sound tore through the night, there was nowhere to run to; we had only somewhere to run from.

What the hell?

We're flying home tomorrow, and tonight the sirens blow?

Subash ran. He just ran, straight toward the desert, almost reaching the Egyptian border because our farm manager had once told us that if the siren ever sounded, the right move was to scatter, to spread out across open ground rather than cluster together, so one strike couldn't take all of us at once.

Two friends from Zambia opened a refrigerator door and moved inside it. A friend from Thailand jumped into a dumpster. Dharma and I dropped to the floor and crawled under a table, as if a table could stop a missile, as if anything in that yard could stop a missile.

We just waited for the missiles to hit us.

Our friends from Far Western University, the ones who had been moved from a place that actually had bunkers to a place that didn't, broke down crying; sobbing harder with every second the siren kept screaming, because they knew exactly what they'd lost in that trade.

Our hearts were in our throats. We were waiting, genuinely waiting, for a missile to land on us. It didn't come.

A test. Nobody had warned us. Nobody had told us it was coming. We had just lived through the worst minutes of our lives for a systems check.

We went back to cooking. The siren blows again. We ran again; this time, Subash, Dharma, Anish, and I ended up under a bed, holding our breath, waiting for the same thing all over again.

Another test.

By the time midnight passed, we weren't just afraid anymore. We were exhausted in a way that goes beyond sleep. We just had to make it to the morning. If we survived until morning, there was a plane.

Going Home

We didn't sleep. Not for a second. We sat with the kind of stillness that comes right before something, waiting for the bus that would only come once the sun was up.

It came. We boarded. We reached Tel Aviv airport. We went through boarding, one process at a time, until we saw it: The Nepali flag, the Nepal flag in the Airplane.

I don't think I can fully explain what that flag meant in that moment. After everything, it meant we were no longer alone in someone else's war.

254 of us boarded that flight home. The rest of our community stayed behind in Israel, some still in hospitals fighting to recover from their injuries, others not yet ready to leave. It was time to take off the plane, and the sound of the engines spinning up was loud enough to make some of us flinch. Our nervous systems hadn't caught up to the fact that we were finally, actually, leaving.

We flew through Dubai. We landed in Kathmandu at 2 AM.

All of Nepal, it felt like, was waiting for us. People who had been praying for names they'd only seen on the news. We were finally, physically, home.

What We Lost

Eleven of our friends never made that flight. Eleven young people who came to Israel to learn agriculture, to build something for their futures, and who instead became casualties in a war that had nothing to do with them and everything to do with where they happened to be standing.

I think about the line between a rescue starting too late and a rescue starting on time. I think about how thin that line was. I think about how angry I still am that it took so long for anyone with real power to move - and how much of that gap, in the end, regular students like us had to fill ourselves, with phone calls and spreadsheets and a letter posted on Facebook because there was no faster way to be heard.