Last month, Cole Aronson traveled to the Moldovan capital of Chișinău—formerly known as Kishinev—with a group of Israeli volunteers helping the local Jewish community tend to the stream of Jewish refugees fleeing war-torn Ukraine. He describes his sweltering final day in the city’s airport:

Na’ama wants to pass out water to the refugees at the airport check-in line and asks me where the plastic cups are. I curse the guy who’s been running the kitchen for the last few weeks for forgetting something so basic and punish him by smoking what I promise will be the last cigarette (okay, the last Winston) of my life. I borrow a lighter from a Hatzalah medic and apologize for yelling when his group brought alien bread into the Irish pub we kashered for the staff and refugees.

Someone’s found plastic cups. I’m charged with one of the two-liter water bottles and give the last of it to a young girl on a mission for a thirsty friend. She’s studied Hebrew well enough in her Ukrainian school to get out the syntactically pristine, heavily accented sentences ubiquitous among the Israelis from Russian-speaking lands I’ve met. Her meek confidence and streaks of blonde hair remind me of my sister. . . .

We land in Tel Aviv five minutes after a hundred soon-to-be new Israelis start waving plastic flags of Zion. Greeting each passenger off the plane is my old pal David, the logistics chief for Hatzalah whose low-grade anxiety actually calms me down. At baggage claim, I give a bag of Israel’s best snack, chocolate-filled Bamba, to my water-bottle friend and wish her and her mother a good Passover and good luck in their new life. A Ukrainian woman who looks more Israeli than most Israelis thanks me in bad English and assures me that she knows where she’s going.

Thank God that Moses and Joshua did too.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.