BEIRUT -- The Israeli military, in coordination with its U.S. and European allies, evacuated hundreds of Syrian rescue workers from near its volatile frontier with Syria in an operation that was the first of its kind.
The evacuees are volunteers who rush to the scene of airstrikes in civilian areas. They are officially known as the Syria Civil Defense, but are more popularly called the White Helmets for their signature hard hats.
Israelis said they were hemmed in from one side -- the sealed border with Israel -- by advancing hostile Syrian troops preparing to take control of the area for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and from another side by militants affiliated with the Islamic State extremist group.
The White Helmets, most of them Syrian women, were transported through Israeli-held territory to Jordan, from where they are expected to be resettled in Europe and Canada in the coming weeks. The White Helmets have received finances and training from the United States and other Western nations for years.
"It was an operation to rescue the rescuers," said one person with knowledge of the mission who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not publicly authorized to discuss its details.
"They were in a terrible state," the person said. "They'd been on the move for days, having to rely on really scant information. Even hours before, they didn't know what was going to happen."
Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said Sunday that 422 White Helmets volunteers were evacuated, instead of the initial 800 cleared for the operation.
A Foreign Ministry spokesman in Jordan, Mohammad al-Kayed, said his country had authorized the United Nations to facilitate the entry of hundreds of Syrians after Britain, Germany and Canada had made a "legally binding undertaking to resettle them within a specified period of time due to a risk to their lives."
Safadi said in a tweet that the specified period of time to resettle the Syrians was three months.
Jordan says it will not open its borders to the newly displaced Syrians. The U.N. says Jordan already hosts at least 650,000 registered Syrian refugees, and the kingdom says it is also home to a similar number of unregistered Syrians. That makes one out of every eight people in Jordan a Syrian refugee.
The Syrian civil war has displaced more than half of the country's population.
Israel's military said the overnight operation was "an exceptional humanitarian gesture," and it posted a video online showing its soldiers handing out water bottles to the evacuees. Analysts said the word "exceptional" made it clear that further evacuations were not to be expected.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a separate video statement, said U.S. President Donald Trump, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and others had asked him to help evacuate the group's members.
"These are people who saved lives and whose lives are now in danger. I authorized bringing them through Israel to other countries as an important humanitarian gesture," Netanyahu said.
The U.S. State Department welcomed the rescue of "these brave volunteers" and cited the U.N., Israel and Jordan for helping with the operation.
The statement from spokesman Heather Nauert also called on Syria's government and its ally Russia "to abide by their commitments, end the violence, and protect all Syrian civilians, including humanitarians such as the White Helmets, in areas formerly part of the southwest de-escalation zone and throughout Syria."
Britain said the operation was possible due to the joint diplomatic efforts, hailing the efforts of the White Helmets to save lives in opposition areas.
Jeremy Hunt, U.K's foreign secretary, called the successful evacuation "fantastic news," and thanked Israel and Jordan in a tweet for acting quickly following the request. The White Helmets, he said, "are the bravest of the brave and in a desperate situation this is at least one ray of hope."
CALLED ENEMY OF SYRIA
Syrian state media on Sunday cited Israel's involvement as evidence that the White Helmets were collaborating with an enemy power. The Syrian government and Russia view the White Helmets as terrorists because they offer rescue services in areas controlled by the country's armed opposition.
Syrian state TV al-Ikhbariya called the evacuation a "scandal." The state-run Syrian Arab News Agency said "the secret" of the group had been revealed, and their "role as an agent ended."
Khaled Abboud, a Syrian lawmaker, said that "foreign powers are pulling their agents out of the battlefield" because of military victories that have quashed the "aggression" against Assad's forces.
Both Syria and Russia have accused the White Helmets of staging rescue missions and chemical attacks to blame on Assad's forces.
The White Helmets have struggled with Syrian government forces before. Some have been pulled from buses during previous evacuations of opposition-held territory and have disappeared into the state's network of prisons.
Their facilities have been targeted, and their volunteers have been hit by so-called double-tap attacks -- bombings that draw the volunteers to an area where forces strike again once the White Helmets are on site.
The members of the White Helmets and their families had been stranded along the frontier with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights after the Syrian government offensive in southwestern Syria began in June.
Surrender deals were previously reached with the armed groups in the region, allowing thousands of Shiite Muslims to evacuate to the northern province of Idlib, where the opposition still holds sway. But one civil defense official, refusing to be identified by name for his safety, said the Russians refused to allow the White Helmets to be evacuated.
That prompted the calls for Israel to act.
Tzachi Hanegbi, Israel's minister of regional cooperation, said in a radio interview Sunday that foreign powers worried that Assad's government would target the White Helmets if his forces seized the territory.
"Now that it appears that the Assad regime is going to regain its hold over all of Syria, the international community wanted to extricate them so that they wouldn't have to pay the price of the enormous hatred that the Syrian regime has for them," he said.
The unprecedented operation came perilously close to failure on multiple occasions through the night, sources with knowledge of the matter said. An initial plan to leave through three separate crossings was scrapped when Islamic State forces took over one of the positions, leaving part of the group trapped and unable to reach the border. Their fate remained uncertain Sunday.
Eventually, the rescue workers and their families -- fragile and exhausted -- crossed the Israeli border on foot as searchlights lit up the night sky. They were then bused through northern Israel to Jordan, where they were met by representatives of the U.N. refugee agency.
For the White Helmets and the Shiite Muslims, the departure from the region was bitter, not knowing if they would ever return.
"We were hoping for a military campaign to reach us here, but unfortunately nothing happened and we're leaving," Hussein Halaq, a Shiite villager, said via a messaging app as he prepared to leave. "Many lost their houses and their future."
But some who remained in Idlib worried that the departure of the Shiites was the government's way of paving the way for a harsh military attack, since it no longer had to worry about collateral damage to its loyalists.
"They were like a card for us, pressing the regime warplanes not to bomb civilians," said Mohammed Saeed, an anti-government activist in Idlib.
Israel is still formally at war with Syria, but this was the first such Israeli intervention in Syria's civil war, now in its eighth year. Although it has sent aid into Syria and has provided medical treatment to thousands of Syrians who reached the Golan Heights frontier, the Israeli military said its actions did not reflect a change to Israel's non-intervention policy in Syria's war, where all the warring parties are considered hostile.
Israel has, however, waded into the conflict to curtail Iran's growing influence in the region or deal with spillover from battles along its border. It has also consistently pushed back against international pressure to take in refugees, even as neighboring Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey have altogether accepted millions of Syrian civilians.
Separately Sunday, al-Ikhbariya TV quoted a military official as saying that a military post in the town of Masyaf in Hama province was hit by an Israeli airstrike. The area houses several defense ministry facilities.
Information for this article was contributed by Sarah El Deeb, Aron Heller, Fares Akram and Omar Akour of The Associated Press; by Ben Hubbard of The New York Times; and by Louisa Loveluck and Ruth Eglash of The Washington Post.
A Section on 07/23/2018