When the Russia-Ukraine war began in 2014, the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol saw heavy fighting; when the frontlines stabilized, it found itself just behind them—and its denizens soon grew accustomed to the sound of sporadic artillery fire. This year, Russian forces destroyed Mariupol almost completely. Dovid Margolin writes:

Gone is the city’s theater, where some 300 people were killed in an airstrike in May. Homes, stores, hotels, and parks have likewise disappeared—they, like the streets they once lined, turned to rubble. Mariupol’s lone synagogue was not spared either. Only the facade remains.

But on Saturday evening, workers pulled something out of the debris: the large metal Chanukah menorah that had once graced the synagogue sanctuary. It had somehow survived the intense fires that destroyed the building and was recovered a day before Hanukkah.

“There’s a sense of great emotion in our community,” says Rabbi Mendel Cohen, director of Chabad-Lubavitch of Mariupol and the city’s only rabbi since 2005. “The overall feeling is that we are witnessing the idea that ‘a little light dispels much darkness.’”

For years, Cohen’s synagogue had operated out of his modest Jewish community center in Mariupol. Sometime before the war, as Jewish life in the seaside city continued expanding, the rabbi sought bigger premises and rented a large space for a synagogue in a solid building on Prospect Mira in the city center, using the old building for storage and limited programming. Both buildings were destroyed.

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.