Bodies of Israelis killed in Nepal bus accident land in Israel
Shira Dabush, 30, and Omer Shemesh, 22, to be laid to rest on Tuesday
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The bodies of the two Israel fatalities in a Nepalese bus crash last Friday were flown to Israel on Monday evening.
Their funerals were scheduled for Tuesday.
Shira Dabush, 30, from Ramat Gan will be buried in the Yarkon Cemetery, and Omer Shemesh, 22, will be laid to rest in the Hod Hasharon cemetery.
The two were killed when a bus plunged off a mountainside, in an accident that claimed 14 lives.
Dabush had just finished her medical residency at the Emek Medical Center in Afula. She was in Nepal on a trip with her boyfriend, the family said.
“Shira was a young physician who recently finished her residence. She graduated from medical school in Beersheba with honors,” Channel 10 quoted her family as saying.
An only child, her mother considered Shira “her whole world,” the family said.
Shemesh was also on the trip with her boyfriend, who was injured lightly in the crash.
One injured Israeli recounted the events in an interview with Channel 10. “At one of the curves, the bus started rolling [off the mountainside],” Ines Attias said, adding that she lost consciousness when the bus flipped over, but she remembered trying to climb out of the bus after it came to rest.
Attias said that, before the crash, the passengers were worried that the bus might be overloaded.
“We thought something was wrong, but they told us that it was normal, that it was the holiday season,” she recalled.
Another survivor told Ynet that “there were about 30 Nepalese in the bus and another 30 on the roof.”
The bus drove off a mountainside road some 35 kilometers (20 miles) north of Kathmandu and fell 50 meters (160 feet) down the mountainside, Israeli media reports said. One Nepalese report in the Himalayan Times said the bus fell 200 meters (650 feet).
The incident marks the second dramatic accident in a fortnight involving Israelis in Nepal. Two weeks ago, four Israeli climbers were killed when a blizzard and avalanches swept the mountains of the Annapurna region in the country’s north.
The avalanches resulted in 43 dead — 21 foreigners and 22 Nepalese guides, porters and villagers — and led to the largest-ever rescue operation in the country’s history: The Nepalese military evacuated 518 stranded trekkers, including 310 foreigners, before the operation was completed last Monday.
The Times of Israel Community.