On August 10, 2025, Israeli forces carried out a targeted airstrike on a tent near al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, killing Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif. For Gazans, al-Sharif was not merely a reporter; he was one of the last living witnesses to their devastation, a man who continued documenting atrocities even as bombs reduced his own family home to rubble. His persistence gave voice to those who had none. His death was not simply the silencing of an individual, it was a calculated message: that to record Gaza’s suffering is itself a crime, that to bear witness and to show it to the world is to sign one’s own death warrant.
Al Jazeera and other news portals condemned the killing as a “blatant and premeditated assault on press freedom,” framing it as part of a deliberate campaign to silence voices exposing Gaza’s destruction. The Israeli government, however, claimed al-Sharif was a Hamas commander, insisting it had “unequivocal proof.” Weeks later, no verifiable evidence had been presented.
Similarly, in March 2025, journalist Hossam Shabat was killed in Beit Hanoun and immediately labeled a Hamas sniper allegedly based on a blurry Excel spreadsheet listing members of a Hamas battalion, in which Shabat was marked as a sniper but no verifiable evidence was provided. The Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders condemned both attacks, emphasizing that journalists are civilians under international law.
Investigations reveal some more troubling patterns: the +972 Magazine exposed an Israeli unit, the “Legitimization Cell,” allegedly tasked with retroactively labeling killed journalists as militants to blunt international backlash; a policy of kill first, justify later, and smear the dead to silence the living. Under international law, journalists are protected unless directly participating in hostilities, yet Israel has repeatedly misused this to claim journalists were Hamas members without proof. As CPJ’s Sherif Mansour warned: “Journalists cannot be treated as combatants simply because their reporting is inconvenient. To do so is to criminalize truth.”
Time and again we have seen that at the heart of Israel’s genocidal strategy is the collapse of categories. Civilians become “human shields,” journalists become “terror operatives,” and children become “future militants.” The tactic is familiar: civilians killed by Israeli bombs, whether doctors, aid workers, or children are often subsequently branded as “Hamas operatives.” By erasing the distinction between civilian and combatant, all are made killable.
These cases symbolize the wider propaganda machine, where empathy itself becomes suspicious. Disturbingly, the same logic has found a foothold in Nepal, where citizens who express solidarity with Gaza are smeared as “Nepali Hamas.”
In Nepal, both online and in daily life, phrases like “Nepali Hamas”, “terrorist”, “supporter of terrorism”, are thrown around whenever citizens condemn atrocities in Gaza. The insult is not merely rhetorical; it collapses compassion into complicity. It mimics Israel’s own justification playbook, where grieving civilians are dismissed as terrorists in disguise.
But the question remains: how can mourning dead children be called extremism? How can solidarity with the oppressed be branded terrorism? Nepalis, with our own history of displacement and exploitation in the Middle East, should know better. Our youth labor in foreign lands, often treated as disposable, and we have seen our own killed in distant wars with little accountability. If we can recognize our own pain, we cannot turn a blind eye to Gaza’s.
The reality on the ground in Gaza is stark, and the facts are backed by the world’s most authoritative institutions. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has described Gaza as “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.” According to UN data, more than 63,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023, of whom the majority are women and children. Entire neighborhoods in Rafah and Khan Younis have been flattened. More than 80 percent of Gaza’s population which is over 1.9 million people have been displaced.
The humanitarian collapse has reached famine conditions. In March 2024, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned: “Palestinians in Gaza are enduring destruction at a scale and speed without parallel in recent history. Nothing justifies the starvation of civilians.” His words were not exaggeration. The IPC (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification) reported in July 2025 that “the entire population of Gaza faces high levels of acute food insecurity, with nearly half a million people in catastrophic famine conditions.”
To support Gaza is not to support Hamas; it is to be human, to be Nepali in the truest sense, committed to peace, dignity, and justice.
The figures are heartbreaking. More than 28,000 women and girls have been killed, and tens of thousands of children are going hungry, nine out of ten under the age of two survive on barely two food groups a day. By March 2024, nearly one in six toddlers in Gaza were severely malnourished, a situation UNICEF called “alarming and unprecedented.” Disease has become another killer: by early 2025, over 360,000 cases from diarrhea to scabies had been reported, showing that more people may die from illness than from bombs as the health system is collapsing. Analysis of an internal Israeli intelligence database indicates that at least 83 percent of Palestinians killed during Israel’s offensive in Gaza were civilians.
And yet, when some Nepalis who understand this tragedy and refuse to turn a blind eye talk about these reports, they are dismissed online and in real life as “propagandists” or “Hamas sympathizers” sometimes even absurdly labeled “Nepali Hamas.” Are the UN, UNICEF, and WHO all Hamas militants too? Or is the real aim of this smear to silence those who witness the suffering, to make compassion a crime, and to bury uncomfortable truths under a veil of ridicule?
Some people on Nepali social media claim that if you condemn Israel’s assault on Gaza, you have no right to sympathize with Bipin Joshi, the Nepali student abducted during the October 7 Hamas attack. This slander works as a shield: it deflects accountability, silences opposition and reduces empathy to extremism. It creates a false choice, as if standing against violence in Gaza somehow disqualifies one from demanding justice and freedom for a Nepali citizen held hostage. Are we not allowed to speak up for Bipin Joshi while also condemning the suffering of Palestinian civilians? Must compassion be selective, confined to one tragedy at the expense of another? To demand Joshi’s freedom is to affirm the value of Nepali lives and to denounce the killing of civilians in Gaza is to affirm the value of human lives. These are not contradictory impulses, they are the same moral instinct.
Joshi, part of Israel’s “Learn & Earn” program, was abducted at Kibbutz Alumim, where 10 Nepalis were killed and five injured. He remains the only Nepali hostage, and his case has become a national symbol of this tragedy.
Nepal’s efforts to secure the release of Hamas-held student Bipin Joshi did not appear strong in the beginning, but in recent months, the government has stepped up its initiatives. Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli and Foreign Minister Arzu Rana Deuba have detailed appeals to leaders from Turkey, Egypt, Qatar, Iran, and the UN, while Nepali embassies in the Gulf continue outreach to mediators. Their efforts, however, have been met with Israeli suggestions that Nepal has not done enough—a framing that appears designed to highlight Israel’s own role while downplaying Nepal’s. This has raised frustration in Kathmandu, where officials point out that Bipin has repeatedly been excluded from past prisoner swaps despite Israel’s assurances, fueling concern that his case is being instrumentalized to shore up Israel’s image during its widely criticized Gaza offensive.
Despite this, some Nepalis have taken the criticism of their own government too far, accusing it of doing nothing. But is the government truly inactive, or is Bipin’s release even fully in Nepal’s hands? The reality is likely deeper and more complicated, shaped not only by Nepal’s diplomacy but also by how Israel itself has handled the hostage issue. Israel, which is facing global isolation for the ongoing massacre in Gaza in the name of defeating Hamas, is seeking to generate favorable international opinion. Even countries that once sympathized with and supported Israel, such as Italy, France, Canada, the UK, and Australia are now disenchanted, and some are even preparing to recognize Palestine as a separate state at the upcoming UN General Assembly. Recently, Israel advanced formal approval for the long-frozen and widely opposed E1 settlement plan, which would add over 3,400 homes in the occupied West Bank, effectively bisecting the territory and cutting East Jerusalem off from the rest of Palestine. More than 20 countries have joined the EU and UN in opposing this illegal move. Against this backdrop, Israel’s priorities appear less about securing hostages’ release and more about entrenching its territorial agenda that raises the question of whether hostages like Bipin are truly central to Israel’s concerns anymore.
Thus, it is high time that we in Nepal rethink all of these and truly understand what is really going on. The phrase “Nepali Hamas”, “supporter of terrorism”, may sound like just another insult that doesn’t hold much weight, but in reality, its implications are grave. It imports into Nepal a dangerous logic: that empathy is extremism, that compassion is complicity. To accept this label is to accept that Bipin Joshi’s life was not worth negotiating for, that Anas al-Sharif deserved his fate, that dead children pulled from rubble were secretly terrorists, and that Palestinians really deserve to lose their identity completely.
Nepal has historically prided itself on neutrality and moral clarity. As one of the largest contributors to UN peacekeeping, Nepal’s soldiers protect civilians in various parts of the world. How hypocritical, then, if at home we denounce citizens for speaking up for civilians in Gaza.
As UN Secretary-General Guterres reminded the world in late 2023: “Civilians must be protected wherever they are, in Israel and in Palestine. To kill them, to starve them, to silence them is indefensible.” These words should reach the ears of every person in Nepal, too.
Today, the genocide in Gaza is not only a Palestinian issue. It is a test of whether international law and humanitarian principles still have meaning. If hospitals can be bombed, journalists assassinated, children starved, and the perpetrators simply cry “terrorist” to excuse it then the entire system of international law collapses.
We must understand that the killing of journalists like Al Sharif and thousands of others in Gaza were not accidental but a warning meant to silence those who bear witness— just as branding Nepali sympathizers as “Nepali Hamas” seeks to suppress voices of solidarity. Both tactics collapse compassion into complicity, turning empathy into extremism. For Nepalis, rejecting this smear is about more than speech; it is about affirming our identity as a people of peacekeeping, neutrality, and compassion. To support Gaza is not to support Hamas; it is to be human, to be Nepali in the truest sense, committed to peace, dignity, and justice. Let us honor the innocent lives lost in Gaza not as mere casualties but as victims for truth and reject divisive labels in favor of solidarity. As the UN has repeatedly affirmed, human rights are universal and defending them is never extremism but our duty.
( Philip Freeman, originally from the United States, is co-founder of the nonprofit “No Limits Nepal” in Karnali, Nepal. He has lived in Nepal on and off for six years and holds a degree in International Relations. Aditi Baral, a graduate in International Economics and Trade from Beijing, has previously worked with Republica Daily and occasionally writes for NepalKhabar. She covers social and human-interest stories from Kathmandu and Beijing.)
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