With a population of about 9.73 million, Israel is about one-34th the size of the United States, which has about 335.55 million people.
That means that the reported death toll of more than 1,400 Israelis from Hamas terrorist attacks is proportional to about 48,300 Americans. The official U.S. count of Americans who died on Sept. 11, 2001 at the World Trade Center is 2,977.
“Many people are saying that this is Israel’s 9/11. In fact, with 300 Israelis confirmed dead so far, this is the equivalent of three 9/11s, given the size of Israel’s population,” wrote Dov Waxman, chair in Israel studies at University of California, Los Angeles and director of the UCLA Center for Israel Studies, on Saturday. (The official death toll has since doubled.)
“Israeli civilians haven’t experienced anything like this since the 1948 war,” Waxman added.
When someone responded on X to his post saying it was a terrible comparison, Waxman said, “It’s a comparison of the civilian casualties in relative terms.”
Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) wrote on Sunday, “Hamas’s surprise terrorist attack by air, land, and sea is Israel’s 9/11. Losing 600 Israelis is the equivalent of losing about 20,000 Americans.”
“If you murder, wound, rape and abduct civilians and children, as Hamas has done, you are not a militant. You are a terrorist. The media should stop sanitizing terrorists as ‘militants,'” the congressman added. “Hamas is a terrorist organization, just like the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are terrorist organizations. Back in 2001, no one in the mainstream media described the attackers on 9/11 as militants.”
