Here to save the day?

The much anticipated arrival of help for and by Israelis in quake-stricken Nepal earns laudatory headlines Tuesday morning, as the full extent of the devastating earthquake begins to come into focus.

“The IDF is here to help,” reads the main headline on Israel Hayom, and you can almost hear the hokey World War II newsreel music and announcer that it seems should be accompanying the news.

Yedioth Ahronoth focuses on the flip side of the coin, the help being proffered to many Israelis stuck in Nepal, including flights home for trekkers and babies born to surrogate mothers. Haaretz, the only paper to not lead with Nepal, still has a front page story focusing on the massive humanitarian disaster there, as the third-world country attempts to cope with the devastation.

Hence the need for the massive international effort being mustered for the country, following Saturday’s 7.8-magnitude earthquake, which vigorously rattled the heavily populated Kathmandu Valley, destroying villages and killing upwards of 4,000 people.

Nir, a captain with the Israeli search and rescue rangers, tells Israel Hayom’s man in Nepal of some high drama as the Israeli plane attempted to land in Kathmandu amid the decimation and planeloads of aid being ferried in.

“We had very little fuel, but the head of the rescue team told us that no matter what, we were going to land in Kathmandu. He said that every moment is important and we need to do everything to land,” he recounts.

“We told the control tower several times that we were low on fuel, but there were planes in the air with less fuel than us. We waited in the air an hour and a half, and all that amid relatively rough weather, with storms and lightning of a type that we don’t know much of in Israel.”

While aid was flowing in, the first attempts were made for Israelis stuck in Nepal to get out of dodge, including a number of parents of newborn babies born to Indian surrogates in Kathmandu.

The paper reports on Israelis in the remote area of Langtang pleading for rescue after some locals threatened to get violent “against the background of a shortage of food,” which is apparently the paper’s euphemism for hungry Israeli trekkers taking food from a collapsed village.

“We need to get out of here today,” the paper quotes backpacker Shachar Zakai writing to his father. “We need to be rescued immediately. The local Nepalis have grown violent and our lives are in danger.”

It wasn’t violence that the parents of newborns were worried about, but having to make it through cold, stormy and shaky nights by facing the choice of either sleeping with the babies outside or hunkering down inside a hotel and hoping aftershocks didn’t cause it to collapse on them.

Yedioth reports on the tears of joy of Ohad Hitman and Ron Harush, who were able to spirit away their newborns Ava and Berry, after years of fighting to get a surrogate and then making it through the quake after the twins were finally born.

“Our kids made it through their first war of survival. It’s truly a miracle,” Hitman is quoted telling the paper. “Our dream is that they grow up to be happy children, who are open to those who are different.”

It’s not all happiness and tears of joy, though. In Haaretz another father writes of having mixed feelings about the rescue flights home.

“On the one hand, seeing an El Al plane coming here to rescue us is an amazing feeling filled with pride,” the father says. “On the other hand, the same country that sends planes to the ends of the earth to save Israelis – is the same country that whose laws force Israelis to go to far-off places and go through such a tough time.”

Legal commentator Aeyal Gross’s call for an “earthquake” for the surrogacy law was likely a poor choice of words for a headline in Haaretz (though Ehud Barak’s warning of a “diplomatic tsunami” in the wake of the Japan earthquake and tsunami in 2011 makes one wonder if Israelis even realize that such turns of phrase are in poor taste).

Offensive wording aside, Gross writes that it’s telling that it took a natural disaster for Israel to finally allow a number of pregnant surrogates to give birth for homosexual couples on its territory, which he calls an “absurdity” that needs to change.

Something borrowed, something explosive?

While Nepal is recovering from its natural disaster, life goes on as normal in Israel’s own violent neck of the woods.

Yedioth reports on the storm brewing in the Golan Height’s Druze community, after it became clear that two of the militants killed by Israel while accused of planting a mine on the border with Syria came from the town of Majdal Shams, on the slopes of the Hermon.

The two, Nazia and Tair Mahmoud, were brothers who held Syrian citizenship and were living at the time in the town of Khader just across the border from Israel.

“We would see them when they went out to hang their laundry,” their uncle, a Majdal Shams resident, tells Yedioth. “It’s hard for me to believe they really planned to plant a bomb as is being claimed, and it’s very hard for me to hear that they were killed. Nazia was supposed to get married this Friday and was counting down the days. Who goes to plant a bomb before their wedding?”

Haaretz’s lead story focuses on new hints that Israel may no longer have a buddy at the UN in the form of Washington, after nuclear negotiator Wendy Sherman said it would be difficult for the US to continue to have Israel’s back without any progress on the two-state solution front.

“If the new Israeli government is seen to be stepping back from its commitment to a two-state solution that will make our job in the international arena much tougher… it will be harder for us to prevent internationalizing the conflict,” she is quoted telling a Reform Judaism convention.

Of course, there is, as of yet, no new Israeli government, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scrambling to finalize the pieces of his coalition ahead of a deadline early next week. While some progress has been made, everything is tangled up in a spaghetti stew from hell of demands from different potential partners, though Netanyahu could notch his first partners as early as Tuesday, Israel Hayom reports.

“Sources involved in the talks assess that once there is agreement on what portfolio the head of Shas will get, they will be able to immediately close deals with Kulanu and UTJ and start on dealing with Shas,” the paper writes.