A drone view of a broken bridge and damaged houses after the flash floods and mudslide, at Devighat, Nuwakot district, Nepal, Aug. 28, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Francis Mascarenhas

Within days of the flood that came down off the Nepal-China border, IsraAID had an emergency team moving toward Rasuwa, NATAN was sending doctors and mental-health workers, and World Jewish Relief was funding water and shelter through a Nepali partner on the ground.

Devastatingly, around 580 people are dead and close to 2,000 are still missing.

Outside a Jewish readership, almost nobody will hear about the Israeli part of it — and in a month, almost nobody will remember. The usual explanation is bias, which is real. But fundamentally, what decides whether a story travels is whether somebody is already in place to receive it — and turn it into a conclusion about the people who sent the teams.

Pointed at Israel, that work has been aggressively staffed since at least 1975.

UN Resolution 3379, which the General Assembly passed in November 1975, called Zionism a form of racism (though it was revoked 16 years later). But that wasn’t all they did in 1975. The Assembly also passed Resolution 3376 on the same day, Nov. 10. It created the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.

Just two years later, Resolution 32/40 B set up a unit inside the Secretariat and ordered it to prepare studies and “promote maximum publicity for them.”

It is the Division for Palestinian Rights now, and it still sits inside the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs.

Agenda Item 7 obliges the UN Human Rights Council to take up Israeli conduct at every single session. No such item exists for China, Iran, Syria, or Sudan — regardless of their track record of disregarding human rights.

The rapporteurship on the Palestinian territories, created in 1993, is the only country mandate in the UN system exempt from periodic review. Every other one comes up for renewal.

So, the United Nations has paid people to publicize a case against Israel, without interruption, for 49 years.

At the moment, there is no standing body or UN mandate whose job is to take an Israeli field hospital in Kathmandu and make it mean something 12 months later. It arrives (if at all), gets written up as a nice thing that happened (though only by Jewish outlets), and stops.

That is why these stories never travel. Somebody is always promoting the bad ones. Nobody is putting the same effort into the opposite.

They do land somewhere, though, and Venezuela is a great place to look for it.

Twin earthquakes of 7.2 and 7.5 hit on June 24 and killed more than 6,000 people. Israel’s Home Front Command dug alongside ZAKA volunteers in the rubble, with IsraAID, NATAN and Magen David Adom behind them. Caracas had cut relations with Jerusalem in 2009 (days after Operation Cast Lead opened) and had gone on to seat an embassy in Ramallah.

On Aug. 11, seven weeks after the earthquakes, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar and Venezuelan Foreign Minister Felix Plasencia agreed to restore consular relations, and the two governments put out a joint statement naming Venezuela’s Jewish community as the bridge they were crossing back over.

Seventeen years of severed relations ended with a rescue team toiling in rubble.

Of course, Delcy Rodriguez had already turned Caracas toward Washington, and Israeli officials say the Americans cleared the approach before it was made. The rubble teams did not manufacture the opening. They handed a government that needed a reason to build ties something they could stand behind.

A newsroom really has nowhere to put an Israeli field hospital. A foreign ministry does.

Ministries keep records and promote people, and the Nepali officials working alongside the Home Front Command in Rasuwa this week will still be in that building in five years, when a minister in Kathmandu is working out whose call to take.

None of which makes the silence easier to endure. None of it is a reason to stop pushing these stories at people. Please push them.  But they were never going to be repaid in coverage. They are being banked somewhere slower, in offices that keep records and outlast the ministers who run them. Nepal has a foreign ministry too.

Uriel Zehavi is Executive Director of the Mitzpe Institute (mitzpe.org) and writes the daily Israel Brief (israelbrief.com). He is the author of four books, most recently Rooted in Judea: Lives and Law in the Heart of Israel, and is making aliyah to Kiryat Shmona with his husband, Modi.