The tenth day of the Hebrew month of Tevet (this year, January 1), is one of the more obscure and poorly understood dates on the Jewish calendar. The best-known explanation is that it commemorates the beginning of the siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, eventually leading to the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E. and the dissolution of the Judean kingdom. Jeffrey Woolf analyzes the significance of the event in light of the biblical prophets:

[The prophet Ezekiel] knew what was going to happen, for he himself had a vision of the catastrophe for which the people were headed. But when the day [of the Babylonian attack on Jerusalem] actually arrived, he found it difficult to assimilate what was happening and therefore the Holy One, blessed be He, had to tell him emphatically, time and again, that this was indeed the reality. Little wonder, therefore, that the rest of the people were even more deeply traumatized when Jerusalem was put under siege. The stern lesson of the tenth of Tevet—that Jerusalem was vulnerable on account of the nation’s corruption—was what led the people to include the day on which the siege of Jerusalem began among the days of mourning and commemoration for the destruction of the First (and later also the Second) Temple.

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.