“I’m just now back from the across the Golan border. Even more civilians are pouring in—they know their protectors will not survive. There!—you can hear a bomb in the background.” Gal Lusky, a founder and leader of the relief organization Israeli Flying Aid, is speaking to me by phone from Israel. She has been working covertly—and audaciously—to support displaced civilians in southwest and northern Syria since the beginning of the insurgency against Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, in April, 2011. Lusky told me that she wanted to publicly disclose her clandestine efforts in view of what she called “the extremity of the situation”—yet another daunting humanitarian crisis, the result of a massive regime-led military offensive in Dara’a, Syria’s southwest province, which Dexter Filkins described last week, and which seems bound to become yet another military flashpoint along Israel’s northeast border. The lives of hundreds of thousands of displaced Syrian civilians are at risk, and Lusky, confident that her group represents Jewish values that her government elides, is determined to rescue whomever she can. Instead of hearing a ring when you call her cell phone, you hear Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon.” She wants callers to understand just whom they are dealing with.

Syrian Army forces, supported by Hezbollah and other Shia militias—and indiscriminate Russian bombing—have been focussing attacks in Dara’a, which is about thirty to forty miles east of the Israeli border. Their targets are remnants of the Free Syrian Army (or F.S.A.)—the ragtag force that was haltingly supported by the Obama Administration from 2011 to 2015, and which the U.S. all but abandoned when the Islamic State and its affiliated insurgents proved to be the common, and more serious, adversary of Assad and U.S.-backed Iraq. Last Friday, the F.S.A. announced a ceasefire ahead of “de-escalation talks,” scheduled for this month, in Sochi. But the Russian Air Force violated the ceasefire almost immediately. The push into Dara’a, and the vast humanitarian suffering it is unleashing, will add to the shadows over Donald Trump’s summit with Vladimir Putin, in Helsinki, next Monday.

Lusky’s efforts to aid civilians fleeing Dara’a are focussed on Israel’s border with Syria, the ceasefire line established by the “disengagement of forces” agreement negotiated by Henry Kissinger in the early summer of 1974, following the war in October, 1973. That agreement established a “buffer zone” between Israeli and Syrian forces, occupied by a token contingent of United Nations peacekeepers—a slim band of territory, about fifty miles long and never more than six and a half miles wide, adding up to about a hundred square miles in all. Previous attacks by the Syrian Army have driven about sixty thousand displaced civilians, many labelled by Assad as F.S.A. collaborators, into this buffer zone. Assuming that they can find it—the zone is just a few hundred yards wide in some places—more Syrian civilians seem likely to crowd into the area, raising the total number to more than three hundred thousand.

Lusky told me that her aid group is working frantically to steer assistance to these people, who are on the edge of starvation and exposed to brutal summer heat without adequate shelter. She assailed the U.N. for following its traditional approach to aid, requiring that the delivery of humanitarian assistance be channelled through the host state’s government. She said that approach was pointless in Syria, where the government is killing its own people. “The U.N. cannot force a regime to provide its own people with humanitarian assistance,” Lusky told me. Indeed, she founded IFA, in 2005, partly in response to this very oversight, which was brought home to Lusky and fellow aid workers in Sri Lanka, in 2004, after the tsunami, when the Sri Lankan government denied aid to desperate Tamil populations who were accused of supporting the Tamil Tiger insurgency. “To get aid to Syria’s civilian victims, the U.N. would rely on the regime that is brutally attacking them, so the aid never gets there,” she said. “Denial of aid, in this case, is murder!”

In April, Trump announced his intention to withdraw all U.S. military forces from Syria. (The exact time frame for this remains unclear.) Simultaneously, the Administration cut the U.S. contribution to the United Nations budget—running at about $1.2 billion—ostensibly to punish the U.N. Human Rights Council for its “anti-Israel” activities. Instead, the cut in funding could hurt the ability of the world body to provide aid to Syrian refugees in Jordan. Lusky laments these cuts to aid, but also said that she sees an opportunity. “For now, Israel is maintaining the buffer zone, where refugees are running for their lives,” she said. “Why not funnel the U.S. money cut from their U.N. contribution to work directly with N.G.O.s on the ground, to feed and provide medical attention—many of them people who’ll be seen by Assad as U.S. collaborators?”

Lusky concedes that this is—in the jargon of an N.G.O. veteran—“a big ask,” politically and financially. The buffer zone was not designed to provide refuge to hundreds of thousands displaced civilians, nor is its purpose to offer implicit protection for a rump group of anti-Assad regime fighters. Successive governments of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have been reconciled to accommodating Assad and Putin—the devils they know—as long as Iranian forces are kept away from the Golan. Netanyahu is in Moscow this week for yet another meeting with Putin, reportedly to discuss “security coördination,” which is code for keeping Iranian troops at least forty to fifty miles from Israel’s border. (On Sunday, Israeli planes, again, attacked Iranian positions at the T-4 air base near Homs; in the past, Putin signalled that he would not act to preëmpt such attacks.)

Israeli military commanders in the north, with whom Lusky now admits she has collaborated, have provided—or enabled aid workers to provide—emergency aid to displaced civilians living under F.S.A. control since at least 2015. Members of the Israel Defense Forces have spirited hundreds of severely injured civilians to Israeli hospitals. But the Israeli military is nevertheless disinclined to create in Syria anything like the security zone it created in southern Lebanon, after the 1982 war—from which it retreated, under Hezbollah fire, in 2000. Jordan, located on Dara’a’s southern border, has already taken in over a million and a half refugees, and the Hashemite regime there can hardly be expected to cope with more. Lusky understands that geopolitical interests are not working in her favor. But she refuses to give up on what she calls “the conscience of the world community.”

Lusky, who is fifty, committed herself to a career in emergency aid because of what happened to her younger brother in that now abandoned Israeli buffer zone in Lebanon. A paratroop commander, he was severely wounded in an Israeli outpost, in 1992, and Lusky—who grew up on a kibbutz near the Sea of Galilee and was just months away from an undergraduate degree in criminology—dropped everything to stay by his bedside for months on end. “That year was a transformation for me,” she told me. “I had bought my home, my own car—the things my mother wanted for me. I told her that if all these things couldn’t get me the one thing I wanted, which was my brother’s recovery, then it was time for me to live my own life.” Slowly, her brother recovered. It seemed obvious to Lusky how “blessed we were” to have Israeli medical facilities and skilled doctors. Her vocation seemed inescapable. “Our family had an adopted grandfather who had survived the Holocaust. What more do I need to say?” she told me. “In 1994, I flew to Rwanda with five thousand dollars in my pocket to join a kibbutz-organized N.G.O. working to track and reunite families. I had no idea what I was doing, only that I might help.”