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.”

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.”