Rachel S.’s first rendezvous took place on a bright afternoon in September 2016. She pulled her rental car onto a desolate shoulder of highway in Area A, 10 miles inside the West Bank, an area off-limits to Israeli citizens. As an American expat, that technically didn’t include her, but she was careful anyway. She was shortly joined by another car, approaching from the opposite direction. Rachel swallowed hard, smiled and greeted Hadia (not her real name) and the other two dark-haired women who exited the car. They placed a large carrier in Rachel’s backseat, then in low voices discussed future logistics and handovers with the women before beginning her return trip.

Rachel’s contraband wriggled in the carrier: five inquisitive kittens.

Rachel S. is one of the ringleaders of a group of kitten smugglers of the West Bank, whose mission is to help cats cross the border to safety.

The round trip from Tel Aviv to the West Bank took Rachel, a 33-year old marketing producer, around four hours, including passing through armed checkpoints. For 23-year-old Hadia and her sister and mother, the journey was less than 30 minutes, but the risk was far greater. “Hadia didn’t want this anywhere near her home ,[as] that would raise red flags,” Rachel said. “No one in her community knows about this. They’re hostile to cats — her neighbors tried to poison them!”

As a Palestinian in the West Bank, Hadia’s clandestine meeting with the Israeli smugglers could create serious problems for her if discovered. Hadia is slim with delicate features and brown eyes. She’s a little shy around strangers. She doesn’t look like an activist. But her love of animals has forced her, reluctantly, to create a smuggling ring, and 200-plus cats owe her their lives, whether she provided veterinary care or shuttled them out of the area.

Palestinian culture is not pet-friendly; many Muslims consider dogs unclean and locals view cats as disease carriers and environment destroyers. There are no definitive numbers on how many street cats the area has, though a 2014 report estimated 10,000 strays inside one governorate; which can be extrapolated into 160,000 cats throughout the West Bank. But if neighboring Israel’s street cat population of some two million felines is anything to go by, the number is likely higher. Overpopulation of street cats is a global issue, but unlike the trap-and-neuter programs established in America, Palestinians have few veterinary resources, which means RIP kitties, no matter how cute.

That didn’t sit with Hadia. As a child, she was drawn to the cats that prowled the street — scrawny felines with feral eyes and ribs poking through their skin. Hadia’s family didn’t have much (25.8 percent of Palestinians live in poverty, according to the United Nations Development Programme), but they let her put out milk and scraps for Hebron’s starving street animals.

“I love animals so much,” Hadia told The Post via WhatsApp. “But the people in West Bank, they kill cats and dogs.”

But Hadia’s community disapproved of the self-styled Dr. Doolittle, and started pushing back — with deadly consequences. Last year both of her dogs were poisoned and died, and when she took some of her cats to get neutered, they all mysteriously died during the operation. To save the cats, she realized she had to give them up, but where could she find a safe home for 26 kittens? She was building a shelter in her backyard, but that wasn’t going to cut it for long.

Israel, with its no-kill laws, warmer attitude toward keeping animals as pets and street cat-friendly vet care — the government has programs to round up and spay feral cats — seemed an obvious choice, but that would mean crossing the green line. It seemed impossible. But as more of her cats fell sick, she knew she had to try.

She joined a Tel Aviv animal rescue Facebook group and sent a request for help in broken English:

“I need someone to help me to provide a safe home in Israel to my 26 cats , i have a lot of cats since 9 years and unfortunately i can’t take care of them in my city in the west bank , no animals organizations , no good vets , no safety. i need to give them to someone who can love and take care of them in safe city which no body will poisons them in it.”

“I didn’t want to let them go but I had to,” she said. She uploaded photographs with her request: snow white blue-eyed fluffball Bella, Zoro, master of tree branches, and playful black and white Mesha’al, who loves making eyes at the camera.

Hadia’s heartfelt plea tugged at Rachel S.’s heartstrings. She’d grown up with cats in New York, and rescued her tortoiseshell tabby cat Jakiki from the Israeli streets. She wanted to help, and together with Rachel T., a French immigrant living in Tel Aviv who also saw Hadia’s post, she devised a plan to extract and rehouse the kittens. Finding them new homes would take time, and they decided the best strategy would be to smuggle the kittens out in groups of eight or so at a time, ferrying them across the border and into foster homes in Tel Aviv. Once they’d been safely neutered, they’d try and get them adopted.

The Rachels knew they needed more manpower to make this happen and created a Facebook group titled Coexistence Kitties, hoping that people’s love for animals would be greater than their current unease with the political climate.

“We’re animal lovers first,” Rachel S. told The Post. “We appeal to that, regardless of the human rights or political position you take. We’re an apolitical group.”

Some kittens quickly found homes in Israel. Nala, a Turkish angora kitten was adopted by a Jerusalem-based musician. Calico Shahinaz (Arabic for “the King’s favorite”) joined a family of four, and Bella went home with office administrator Sophie Shachar, who renamed her Midori. “I love her so much!” Shachar wrote in the Facebook group. Hadia replied with two smiley-faced emoticons and a heart.

So far, the kitten smugglers have evaded the notice of border control the four times they’ve dared to cross with the kittens so far. Sitting in a rented car with Israeli plates, Rachel S. felt pretty secure. It’s Palestinians who need to worry about border crossings. “I wasn’t nervous for myself, I was more nervous for [Hadia],” she said. Before this, Rachel S. had only ever crossed the border as part of a supervised tour group.

The group also needed to avoid Israeli authorities. Kitten smuggling is illegal under Israel’s animal import laws, which specify that animals must be four months old or above, have a certificate of health and be chipped and vaccinated. If the contraband was discovered, the Rachels could lose their visas and get fined, Hadia and her family could be ostracized, and the kittens could be killed. On the flip side, Hadia’s home terriroty lacks animal welfare laws and isn’t concerned about their strays being removed.

The Palestine Animal League (PAL), established in 2011, is working to change that. In a recent report, the advocacy group encouraged implementation of new practices to prevent overpopulation: “It is vital that municipalities take active steps to promote the spaying and neutering of family pets within their communities.”

PAL fights to outlaw the type of behavior that killed Hadia’s pets. “A death caused by ingesting poison is painful and often protracted. There is a high level of suffering involved for the animals in question,” they wrote.

PAL executive director Ahmad Safi believes compassionate care is irrelevant to poverty or prejudice. “We are the people who need animal rights the most,” he told the Palestine Monitor. “We understand pain and frustration, we should not inflict the pain we feel on others.”

But for every kitten rescued and rehomed, more take their place — and Coexistence Kitties is running out of resources. In an unforeseen turn, Hadia’s successes have incited more Palestinian women to take action, and in December, Ruba Abuayyash, a 39-year-old Palestinian schoolteacher contacted the Rachels about her 30-something cat posse. “I can’t say no [to] any cat that needs help,” Ruba wrote on the group’s wall. Right now, half of her salary is spent on cat food and medication, and it’s still not enough as cats are dying. “I lost two of them within a week [and] I don’t want to lose the others.”

But the Coexistence Kitties team is operating at full capacity, and need to rehome their current batch of kittens before making another trip. They had to come up with a new plan.

The group’s new focus is to get all of Hadia and Ruba’s male cats neutered — tomcats can be done quickly and easily, while spaying females means clinic aftercare. They have help from an unexpected source, as one of the vets at the Israeli clinic they took the kittens to is part Israeli, part Arabic, and can access the West Bank; he’s visited once, and is planning to return soon. It’s still not a perfect solution, but it’s workable for now. And Palestinian’s approach to animal care is starting to shift, if slowly. In 2016, Gaza had their first ever dog show, and the country’s first animal sanctuary opened in 2014. The cultural attitudes and political divides are challenging, but the women of Coexistence Kitties are determined to evolve their methods and help as many animals as possible.

“The adoption program, while well-intentioned, wasn’t a sustainable solution,” Rachel S. said. “We could only bring a limited number of kittens at a time, and finding homes was more challenging than we anticipated. Even if we had more resources in Tel Aviv we could never keep up.”