A Foreign Student Saved His Friends From Hamas. Then He Vanished.

Outside, the Hamas gunmen marauding through the orchards and dairy barn of Kibbutz Alumim were killing anyone they could find. The Nepalis had arrived in Israel just three weeks earlier, on a college program to tend orange and lemon groves. They were two days short of their first paycheck. Now, somehow, they were huddled against a wall, bracing for impact.

Bipin lunged forward, picked up one grenade and lobbed it to safety. But he wasn’t able to reach the second in time. It exploded, throwing five of his friends to the floor, gravely injured.

By all accounts, the 23-year-old agricultural-science student and amateur rapper behaved heroically that day. He corralled fellow workers to the safety of a nearby kitchen, then tried to rally the group to slip back out and rescue the grenade victims. Before they could move, though, the militants returned with reinforcements. The gunmen barged through the kitchen doors and grabbed Bipin and three Thai farmers hiding nearby. Bipin hasn’t been heard from since.

Bipin Joshi’s story is just one tiny piece of what is shaping up as the most complicated kidnapping crisis in modern history. By Israel’s count, militants took 239 hostages during Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. Those captives, held in tunnels under the Gaza Strip, include 10 Americans.

There are also dozens of laborers from a half-dozen countries as far apart as East Africa and Southeast Asia. Among the known hostages are 23 Thai farmers, two Tanzanian dairy workers, and caregivers from Sri Lanka and the Philippines. The search to find them has become a crash course in hostage diplomacy for governments on the margins of global power.

While the U.S. has sent surveillance drones over Gaza, alongside FBI agents, special forces, and a deputy presidential envoy for hostage affairs to Israel to help identify and retrieve the kidnapped—supported by two aircraft-carrier groups in the eastern Mediterranean—Nepal, Thailand and Tanzania have faced a lonelier struggle.

Which of their nationals were taken? Who has them? And what could convince the hostage holders to release the dozens of ordinary farmworkers presumably stuck in tunnels, thousands of miles from home?

In this mass abduction, there has been no formal master list of hostages held, as Hamas and the other Palestinian groups holding captives haven’t provided one. Proofs-of-life have emerged as a trickle, starting with Israeli or European captives. To solve the riddle of a single student farm worker’s disappearance, a small number of Nepali diplomats, local volunteers, and Bipin’s friends have had to piece together fragments of evidence and contradictory clues from an overwhelmed Israeli bureaucracy.

The Nepali government, still in its first year, has struggled in the chaos of wartime Israel to answer the most basic question: Is Bipin alive?

“The last 30 days have felt like 30 years…it’s the first time we’ve been involved in a crisis like this," said Kanta Rizal, Nepal’s ambassador to Israel, who said she has been telling the same story to every official she’s managed to meet: “Bipin is special because he’s a hero. He saved his friends."

To understand how nations on the periphery of the Middle Eastern crisis are navigating a new age of hostage diplomacy, The Wall Street Journal spoke to ministers, diplomats, and local officials from Nepal, Thailand and Tanzania, as well as the U.S., Israel, Qatar, Egypt and humanitarians involved in managing hostage exchanges including at the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Reporters also reviewed survivors’ video and social-media messages from the Oct. 7 abductions, spoke to forensic investigators in Israel scrutinizing human remains, and traveled to the rural far west of Nepal to meet Bipin’s family.

“We are barely surviving, hanging on to a thread of hope," said Mahanand Joshi, father of Bipin, who has helped organize #BringBackBipin marches in his town in the Himalayan foothills. “Every passing moment without the news of where our son is, whether he is even alive, is pushing us to the brink."

When he left for Israel on Sept. 13, Bipin reassured his mother, a teacher like his father, that he would be fine. “I will see the world," he told her.

An agricultural student at Nepal’s Far Western University, he numbered among the inaugural group of 49 Nepalis sent by his college to Israeli farmsteads, including Alumim, a kibbutz perched hard against the Gaza border. The idea of the program, dubbed “Learn and Earn," was to gain insight into Israeli farming techniques while making many multiples of what they could at home.

At nights, the 24 Thais who had worked on the Kibbutz for years, picking up Hebrew, would feast on spicy som tam papaya salad, and whiskey flown in from home, the Nepalis preferring cumin-spiced potatoes and Israeli beer. After a few drinks, the Thais would break into karaoke and entertain a group of curious Nepalis dropping in from a nearby mushroom farm. Bipin, who preferred 2Pac and Nas, had rapped about the hardships of Nepali farmers in his politically conscious song—“Prashna," meaning “Question"—over a gritty, Wu Tang-stylized beat. Every evening, after shifts nearing 10 hours, he would call home to wish his mom good night.

The Thais and Nepalis were among the tens of thousands of workers Israel had brought in to farm on kibbutzim that once relied on labor from the Gaza Strip. They included Pongsak Tanna, who would organize weekend cockfights for the other Thais. Korawit Kaeokoed preferred to swim in the local pool after long weeks earning money for his two daughters and to develop a plot of land in eastern Thailand. The tattoo across his neck read: “Wealthy."

When occasional rockets flew overhead from Gaza, evading Israel’s Iron Dome air defenses, Bipin would video call old university friends in his dormitory’s kitchen bunker and describe vapor trails streaking the sky. He made his friends promise they wouldn’t tell his parents—he didn’t want them to worry.

“I’ll send money, and you organize worship and prayers for me," he told his mom on Oct. 6. Soon, at a local temple of the Universal Mother Goddess Durga, she would offer prayers for Dashain, the biggest festival in the Hindu-majority Nepal, to mark her victory over demons to protect her children.

Almost as soon as Bipin awoke on Oct. 7 to the rumble of explosions beyond his bunk bed window, his phone began pinging with videos from other Nepali farmers of rockets streaking through the early morning sky.

“How frightening," one wrote on a group chat. “Be careful, guys," replied another.

Hearing the rockets and gunfire grow closer, Bipin realized this assault was different. The Nepalis and Thais split and scrambled to different bunkers. Kaeokoed, who lived in the dorm next to Bipin, moved to the dairy farm, then eventually clambered up onto a hiding place above a fridge, texting his wife: “I won’t be coming home." Other Thais hid under wooden tables in a kitchen, next to crates of onions, and waited. As the nervous minutes ticked by, one farmer gestured to another to bring over a bottle of whiskey to pass the time. “Is that shooting? Is it soldiers?"

‘Why does it sound so close?"

In the Nepali bunker, 17 workers had hunkered shoulder-to-shoulder, filling the small and windowless room. They posed for a selfie, with Bipin squatting in front, smiling at the camera. Several opened up a cellphone to play the board game Ludo, while Prabesh Bhandari, another farm worker, took another photo of Bipin, captioned on Facebook: “Bunker time."

“Ludo time," replied one of the farmers.

Bipin looked up from the game to hear the gunfire drawing closer then panicked screams. Bullets began crackling through the walls of the dormitory.

Israeli laws requiring homes to maintain a secure safe room were enforced spottily, especially in the dwellings of farm hands, and it was easy for Hamas to burst in. One Nepali student taking videos near the door was shot dead, as was another who shouted, “we are Nepali." A pair of grenades tumbled into the room. The one that exploded left several people unconscious, while others writhed in pain.

The militants hurried on and soon the farmers could hear the voices of Israeli police officers telling those who could to gather in a nearby kitchen. As Nepalis and a handful of Thais retreated to hiding places, Bipin tried to rally the group to slip back out and help treat the Nepalis the grenade had wounded.

He hurriedly thumbed out a couple of texts to his cousin, Basu Dev, in English: “If something happen with me you have to be take care of family."

“Be strong and always see future."

A rifle-clutching young militant burst into the kitchen, ordering Bipin and three Thais closest to the door out at gunpoint. Another assailant lifted up his phone to record the capture. It was the last time Bipin would be seen alive.

As the four farmers vanished, the Nepalis, still hiding, could hear one of the Thais, pleading to be exempt from the Middle East’s most intractable conflict: “Thailand, Thailand!"

“Are you Muslim?" a gunman asked.

Bipin said nothing.

A security camera at Kibbutz Alumim caught a brief glimpse of the attackers corralling four men into a separate building, two of them limping, wounded, none of their faces clear.

In the kitchen, the Nepalis still hiding could hear the gunmen scream: “Run! Run!"

Worker 1725: Missing

Nepal’s ambassador was looking for answers nobody had.

Facebook pages and WhatsApp groups connecting Nepal to Israel were piling up with pictures and messages of students caught in the attack and demanding ambulances or a flight home, a cloud of information, difficult to verify. Nepalis still in hiding were whispering horror stories into phone calls with Ambassador Rizal and the two other officials posted to her Tel Aviv embassy, who now needed to account for hundreds of their citizens in dozens of kibbutzim, lost in a country thrown into chaos.

Soldiers were clearing the borderlands near Gaza, and the governments of Thailand and Nepal were turning to an avocado farmer at Kibbutz Alumim, Gilad Honwold, to confirm their fears.

“We are waiting for your message to inform my government," read a text on his phone, from Nepal’s embassy.

Honwold was scouring the twisted masonry and torched tin roofs of ransacked and ash-strewn barns to take an inventory of the dead and missing. He counted more than 20 bodies laying in the bunkers, the kitchen, or on the pavement. Three of the men taken hostage had been shot and discarded behind the dairy plant. Kaeokoed, the Thai farmer, remained in his hiding place above the fridge, afraid to come out. Friends had to repeatedly reassure him over a WhatsApp group it was safe to climb down.

Bipin was nowhere to be seen.

The notification to the Nepali ambassador came in a texted photo of a roughhewn scrap of paper, from Honwold’s notebook, scrawled in Hebrew. Six Nepali workers from Kibbutz Alumim were alive, listed alongside their registration numbers.

Only one of the Nepalis, worker number 1725, was annotated: “missing."

“All the rest are dead."

Was Bipin among those killed, his body lost or too badly burned for recognition? Or had Hamas abducted him into its tunnels? His friends scoured videos being posted from Gaza, looking for his face or tall, familiar figure. The Joshi family, from their home near the Mahakali River that winds between India and Nepal, was texting and calling Bipin’s phone to no avail.

“I lost all sense of the world," his father said.

Nepal’s ambassador notified the Israeli Foreign Ministry of a missing citizen. The name slipped into a stack of the disappeared that was growing into the thousands, overwhelming the Israeli authorities combing firsthand reports and unidentified bodies. Hour by hour, new bags of human remains—at times, just a fragment of scorched bone—were piling up in the hallways of Israel’s National Center of Forensic Medicine, where lab technicians in green hospital scrubs tried to link the deceased to a name.

As Israel faltered, Western powers turned to the best-equipped country on the ground. Within hours of the attack, Washington had flown in the first officials of a swelling team from the State Department and the FBI-led Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell, a collection of intelligence and law enforcement officers, helmed by a deputy from the Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs’s office—backed by Marines, special forces and the U.S. Navy’s George R. Ford aircraft carrier group, equipped to help recover and medically treat American hostages. America needed only days to identify the 12 U.S. nationals confirmed as kidnapped.

Then, it turned to helping its closest allies: the U.K. and Canada.

‘We Will Help You Find Your Friend’

Nepal’s foreign minister flew to Tel Aviv, a chance to raise Bipin’s case in person with Israel’s foreign minister who would meet him on arrival.

But Narayan Prakash Saud had to first fly commercial to Dubai, sidestepping Saudi Arabia’s restrictions on Israel-bound flights, then transfer to a chartered jet, and by the time he finally touched down, his Israeli counterpart had rushed off for an emergency security meeting.

Instead, a military officer and protocol officials escorted Saud toward the 254-strong crowd of Nepalis he had come to evacuate, some of their clothes creased from sleeping overnight on the airport floor. Nepali workers from Kibbutz Alumim stepped forward with a question: Where is Bipin?

“We will help you find your friend," Nepal’s ambassador reassured them.

Qatar, Saud had learned, was the principal Middle Eastern government helping relay requests to the militants. But the tiny state’s foreign minister, who also serves as prime minister, was inundated with calls and visits with the top diplomats of the U.S., Israel, France, Canada, Thailand, South Korea, Jordan, Liberia, and Iran.

After several days, the Nepali foreign minister managed to reach the deputy to the Qatari foreign minister and asked him to deliver Hamas a message: Bipin Joshi was an innocent agricultural student who should be set free.

Qatar, rather than try to separately identify and negotiate the release of each disparate individual from so many countries around the world, was encouraging Hamas to release all the civilians they had, from every nation. But Hamas wouldn’t release its hostages until Israel stopped its airstrikes. And Israel wouldn’t stop its airstrikes until Hamas released the hostages. Egyptian officials, complicating things, wanted to focus on negotiating humanitarian aid into Gaza first, then deal with the captives.

In any event, Qatar didn’t know whether Hamas held Bipin. Hamas wasn’t providing a clean or coherent list of hostages. Perhaps dozens of those missing, Hamas leaders claimed, had been kidnapped by criminals who’d crossed into Israel during the mayhem. The Israeli foreign ministry, after two weeks, remained noncommittal, deeming in an email to Nepal’s embassy that he “has likely been kidnapped."

Nepal’s ambassador tried other diplomatic avenues. She called the International Committee of the Red Cross to brief them on Bipin’s case, although the agency was overwhelmed and internet blackouts in Gaza often left it unable to even reach its own staff. When she met Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, she told him Bipin deserved “special attention" because his bravery had saved lives. But the presidency had no confirmation of his status, either.

She joined in seeking help from a group of Israeli volunteers in a makeshift office in Tel Aviv’s Expo convention center, using facial-recognition software to painstakingly piece together what had happened to the missing. The volunteers had started with a list of some 2,500 names, ticking through Israelis and dual nationals, before recruiting Spanish, Chinese and Thai speakers to account for the foreigners. The last name on their list of Nepalis to check on was Bipin Joshi, marked: “no contact."

The volunteers scrutinized hours of gruesome videos from Gaza, waking up at night disturbed—just as new texts came in from governments of Argentina, Thailand, or Nepal. But Bipin didn’t appear once. Then, after weeks of pulling security camera footage from the farms along the Gaza border, and scrolling through hours of video, Honwald, the avocado farmer, sent them a 22-second stretch of four men being marched down a Kibbutz Alumim wall, two limping. Three of them looked Thai, their shoulders turned to the militant holding up his phone to record them. But the Nepalis couldn’t agree on whether the fourth, bent over in a blue T-shirt and khaki shorts, was Bipin.

The volunteers sent their best guess to the embassy and police: Missing person Bipin Joshi had likely been kidnapped.

By then, other hostages were starting to go free. Hamas released two Americans on Oct. 20, followed by a pair of Israelis. By early November, Thailand’s military intelligence managed to secure a proof-of-life—19 of their nationals, photographed in captivity—accompanied with assurances from Hamas that the Thais would come home soon.

The Nepali government had dispatched a DNA collection team to the Joshi home, to check the sample against unclaimed bodies. None matched. The family’s frustration was building. They and his friends descended on a local government office for a protest waving placards: “WAKE UP NEPAL GOVERNMENT." “SAVE BIPIN JOSHI."

“We are only getting assurances and assurances," said Padma Joshi, his mother.

Despite its efforts, Nepal’s government still can’t confirm whether Bipin is alive. Last week, U.S. Sec. of State Antony Blinken expressed his “concern for Bipin Joshi, who remains missing."

But in recent days another piece of information has reached the Joshi family, after Israeli intelligence ran Bipin’s phone number. The last place it had pinged from was Gaza.

Anat Peled contributed to this article.

Write to Drew Hinshaw at drew.hinshaw@wsj.com, Joe Parkinson at joe.parkinson@wsj.com and Krishna Pokharel at krishna.pokharel@wsj.com