In 2016 and 2017, the White Helmets—Syrian volunteers who have risked their lives to rescue civilians trapped in rubble following air strikes, barrel bombings, and chemical-weapons attacks—were among the front-runners for the Nobel Peace Prize. A collection of bakers, tailors, engineers, pharmacists, painters, carpenters, and students nicknamed for their protective hats, they have saved more than a hundred thousand people in Syria’s vicious civil war. Their rescues produced iconic images: a little boy caked in dust and blood, sitting in silent shock on an orange ambulance seat; the triumphant rescue of a “miracle baby,” only ten days old, pulled from under huge concrete slabs after sixteen hours of digging. The lead rescuer of the baby was himself killed, in an air strike suspected to have been carried out by government forces, two years later. So far, more than two hundred White Helmets have been killed while rescuing others. Their motto is “to save one life is to save all of humanity.” In 2017, a film about them won the Oscar for best documentary short.

Over the weekend, the White Helmets themselves had to be rescued. The flight of hundreds of rescuers marks a strategic and psychological turning point in the seven-year war. In a brutal, lightning offensive launched last month, the Syrian military, backed by Russian airpower, has retaken territory in the southwest, along the border with Israel and Jordan, that was the birthplace of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, in 2011. The first protests began in the city of Dara’a, after schoolchildren there were arrested for painting anti-government graffiti. As the demonstrations spread nationwide, Assad unleashed his military. The uprising grew into a civil war that is now estimated to have killed nearly half a million people.

This month, Dara’a finally fell to Assad’s guns. Armed rebels agreed to terms of surrender that allowed them either to reconcile with the government or evacuate to the northern province of Idlib, on the border with Turkey. The Russians reportedly balked, however, at allowing civilian members of the White Helmets—who have been funded by Western governments—to find safety. Syria and Russia have falsely accused them of being terrorists and jihadi supporters, because they work in opposition areas where there are little or no government services. On its Web site, the group claims to “save people on all sides of the conflict.” In previous surrender deals, White Helmets were reportedly detained by government forces and sent to Syria’s notorious prisons.

This time, hundreds of White Helmets, who include both men and women, fled with their families to the Israeli border. Syria and Israel are still technically at war, and there are no formal exit or entrance posts on either side. The White Helmets were trapped. As their fate grew increasingly precarious, Western governments huddled over how to rescue them; they were even discussed at the NATO summit in Brussels this month. The United States, Canada, and European countries appealed to Israel and Jordan for help. For seven years, Israel has formally avoided intervention in Syria’s civil war. Its air strikes have targeted Iranian and Hezbollah deployments in Syria that threatened Israel, consistent with a long-standing policy that predates the civil war. Jordan, which has already taken in more than six hundred thousand Syrian refugees, had closed its borders to others fleeing the new offensive.

Late last week, however, Israel and Jordan signed on, after appeals from the Trump Administration, the Europeans, and Canada. The Israeli government agreed to evacuate the White Helmets and transfer them to Jordan. The Jordanian government agreed to take in a total of eight hundred—briefly. The evacuation began late on Saturday night. Communicating the plan with the stranded group of White Helmets was difficult. The operation, which called for crossing the border at three junctures, came close to failure when ISIS fighters in the region moved on one location, the Washington Post reported, cutting off an exit and leaving some members of the group isolated. With the help of searchlights from the Israeli side, about half of the White Helmets, exhausted and fearful, eventually made it across the Israeli border by foot. Israeli security forces picked up about a hundred White Helmets and some three hundred of their family members. They were ferried in buses across the Golan Heights to Jordan.

“The lives of these people, who have saved lives, were now in danger,” the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said. “I therefore authorized their transfer via Israel to other countries as an important humanitarian gesture.” As part of the deal, the White Helmets will be resettled in Britain, Canada, and Germany after being vetted in Jordan, a process that is expected to take months.

The White Helmets are not expected to be resettled in the United States, despite long-standing U.S. government support for the Syrian first responders. In the past, the U.S. provided up to a third of the group’s funding. State Department officials have hosted or invited its members to Washington as recently as this year. President Trump personally supported the evacuation mission. But Syria is one of the countries on his recently upheld travel ban.

In contrast, the Canadian Foreign Ministry said that it felt a “deep moral responsibility towards these brave and selfless people.” The British government said that it felt compelled to take in some White Helmets due to the group’s “brave and selfless work” to rescue Syrians “on all sides of the conflict.” The German Foreign Minister, Heiko Maas, was quoted as saying that “humanity dictates that many of these brave first-aiders should now find protection and refuge, some of them in Germany.”

Assad’s latest offensive does not mean the end of the White Helmets group, which is formally known as the Syria Civil Defense. But pressure on members who remain in pockets not yet retaken by the government is likely to increase in the months ahead. At its peak, the White Helmets claimed some thirty-four hundred members, making the group the largest civil-society movement outside of government control during the war. It also repaired basic services, such as electricity, disrupted by the fighting.

The Assad regime, backed by massive Russian and Iranian military support, has now reëstablished control over most of Syria, including most of its biggest cities. The last major holdouts are pockets in the east, occupied by ISIS fighters, and Idlib Province, in the north on the Turkish border. For the White Helmets, the most immediate danger is to almost four hundred members of the group and their relatives who did not make it out of the southwest during the Israeli evacuation. Their fate remains uncertain—and even more precarious.