A Palestinian child sits next to a plate before an "iftar" meal, the breaking of fast, on the second day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, at a shelter for displaced people in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on March 12, 2024. (Credit: Mohammed Abed/AFP)
Sixty-eight orphaned children and eleven caregivers plus the caregivers' families were evacuated from an orphanage in the southern Gazan city of Rafah and taken to the West Bank on Monday, according to a statement released by the German Embassy in Tel Aviv.
The embassy described the transfer as a "temporary measure during the war, taking the children out of acute danger, not an attempt to relocate them permanently."
The children were moved from an orphanage called SOS Kinderdorf Rafah, to an unnamed orphanage in Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in an operation that was approved by the Israeli government and carried out by its army. It's likely that the Bethlehem destination is SOS' West Bank branch.
Haaretz reported that the SOS Kinderdorf organization, also known as SOS Children's Villages, reached out to German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock for assistance at their Rafah branch.
According to the organization's website, the Rafah orphanage was established in 2000. On Jan. 4, the organization received the first group of five children whose parents had been killed by the Israeli offensive. The orphanage had agreed to take in up to 55 children, to join the 70 that were already under its care. In a statement announcing their arrival, SOS said that one of the children, a three-year-old girl, was brought to the orphanage by a partner agency, who found her "alone at one of the checkpoints in Gaza."
The move has been criticized by both sides, with comments on social media calling Germany hypocritical for touting the transfer while the country has exported 300 million euros worth of military gear to Israel in the last year. On the Israeli side, The Times of Israel quoted Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich as calling the evacuation, which was approved by the Prime Minister's office but not by the Security Cabinet, an "ethical failure," and the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) quoted a senior Cabinet official saying it was a “scandal.”
Israelis attempted to block the buses carrying the children and their caregivers as the convoy, escorted by the army, passed through a checkpoint in the West Bank. One of them told JNS that they were blocking the buses because they felt Israel had failed to achieve a similar transfer of Israelis still held hostage in Gaza.
In mid-February, UNICEF, the UN agency for the protection of children, declared that according to its estimates, at least 17,000 children in the Gaza Strip are either unaccompanied or have been separated from their immediate family since the beginning of the war. In January, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor declared that an estimated 24,000 to 25,000 children in Gaza had lost one or both of their parents in the war.
The European Union is expected to call for an "immediate humanitarian pause leading to a sustainable cease-fire" in Gaza and to ask the Israeli government to "refrain from a ground operation in Rafah," where more than half of the population of Gaza is packed in, seeking shelter from Israeli aggression, although bombardments continue there as well.