Since 2002, the Ukrainian city of Dnipro has been home to a large factory for baking shmurah (literally, “guarded”) matzah, the round, handmade unleavened bread produced under especially stringent conditions for use at the seder—and, for some Jews, for exclusive use during all of Passover. Thanks to favorable economic conditions, the factory was able to export its matzahs to Israel, the U.S., and Europe. That all changed when Russia invaded central Ukraine in 2022, as Mendy Wineberg writes:

The Russian navy blockaded all shipping in and out of Ukraine, immediately creating a crisis for the final shipments of matzah sitting in the port of Odessa that year. . . . As the battlefront spread deeper into Ukraine, wheat fields in the Zaporizhia region that had long been relied on for the special . . . wheat used in shmurah matzah were too dangerous to be accessed. Regular power outages caused by missile, bomb, and drone attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure hampered the bakery’s efforts to produce matzah.

As the blockade continues with no signs of letting up, trucking the matzah to the nearest ports in Romania or Poland, a journey of at least 600 miles, is the only way to ship the precious cargo overseas—a factor that has added significant cost and time to the project.

Despite the challenges, the bakery has managed to meet demand. This year, the two bakeries in Dnipro and Uman will be shipping out a whopping 300,000 pounds of matzah, or 150 tons, about half of which goes to the United States.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.