Plane carrying advance medical team to help earthquake rescue efforts returns to Israel with three newborns, their Israeli parents and their surrogate mothers

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Israel has begun evacuating surrogate-born babies and their Israeli parents from Nepal, on the return legs of flights sent to provide earthquake relief.

Many Israeli male couples have fathered children with the help of surrogate mothers in Nepal because surrogacy is illegal in Israel for same-sex couples.

Three newborns were flown to Israel on a small military aircraft that had carried an advance team of doctors to Nepal to help rescue efforts after Saturday’s earthquake. Eleven passengers were on board the return flight.

Israel’s foreign ministry said preparations were under way to bring back a further 22 infants, their parents who had travelled to Nepal before the disaster and four surrogate mothers.

Yossi Filiba, from Tel Aviv, said he had gone to Nepal more than three weeks ago for the birth of his baby girl, Na’ama.

The 44-year-old added that he and several Israeli couples and their babies had found shelter in the ground floor of a building in Kathmandu and were waiting for the Israeli air force to evacuate them.

“We don’t know when they will get here,” he said. “The water is going to finish and I am with a small baby. There is very little food and no electricity, although sometimes there is a generator.”

Filiba said he was feeding his daughter in his apartment when the earthquakestruck. “I grabbed the baby, ran down three floors and out to open space. All around us, small buildings were collapsing and people were terrified,” he added.

Filiba said Israeli parents usually spend a month in Nepal for their child’s birth and to make final arrangements to bring the infant home.

The Israeli military has already sent an 80-member search-and-rescue team to Nepal and planned to send other aircraft with a field hospital and medical personnel later on Monday.

Filiba said the planes could not come soon enough. “There are cracks all over the building,” he said. “I’m not sleeping because of the baby – which is a good reason – but I’m also not sleeping because of worries about the building collapsing.”

Israel’s parliament is considering changing Israeli surrogacy laws.