At the United Nations General Assembly in New York this September, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu walked to the podium to a mixture of boos and cheers, as a number of delegates stood up and left the hall. In the speech that followed, he returned to a comparison he has reached for since the earliest days of the war: that the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, scaled up to the size of the American population, would amount to something like sixteen attacks on the scale of September 11, 2001. It is a vivid, deliberately jarring image, built for a room full of people who still remember exactly where they were on that day in 2001. It is also, on closer inspection, a kind of arithmetic that gets used by almost everyone in this conflict, pointed in whichever direction suits the speaker.
What Was Actually Said
The comparison itself is simple enough to follow. On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led fighters killed roughly 1,200 people inside Israel in a single day, a country with a population of under ten million. Scale that death toll up to the size of the United States, a nation more than thirty times larger, and the proportional figure comes out to something near forty thousand. Divide that by the roughly three thousand people killed on September 11, and you land close to the number Netanyahu used at the podium. “That’s sixteen times 9/11,” he told the assembly. “Sixteen 9/11s that occurred not very far from here.” He went on to call allegations that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza “the biggest lie of the century,” and defended Israel’s strikes on Iran earlier in the year as among the easiest decisions he has made.
Not a New Line
None of this was actually new. Netanyahu reached for a version of this same comparison within days of the October 7 attacks, describing them from the outset as Israel’s own September 11. He was not alone in doing the math that way. In the same early weeks of the war, then President Joe Biden used almost identical language, describing the scale of the attack, relative to Israel’s population, as something like fifteen 9/11s. By the time Netanyahu repeated the figure at the UN three years later, with a slightly higher number attached, it had become a familiar refrain rather than a fresh argument, repeated often enough that fact had already confirmed, more than once, that the quote was being accurately reported rather than invented or exaggerated online.
The Same Math, Pointed the Other Way
What makes the comparison worth examining is not whether Netanyahu said it, which is not in doubt, but what kind of argument it actually is. And here the picture gets more complicated, because the same rhetorical move has been made, with the same method and the same confidence, in the opposite direction. In 2014, during an earlier round of the conflict, the broadcaster Joy Reid described Palestinian casualties in Gaza using the identical logic, scaling Gaza’s population up to the size of the United States and arriving at a figure she described as roughly a hundred 9/11s. Fact-checkers who reviewed her numbers at the time found that her arithmetic, using the population ratios she had chosen, actually held up reasonably well. The issue they raised was not the calculation. It was the unit itself.
A mathematician interviewed about that same comparison, Jordan Ellenberg of the University of Wisconsin, made the deeper point worth sitting with here: a death toll expressed as a multiple of 9/11 depends entirely on which population you choose to scale against, and that choice can be made to produce almost any number you like. The same Israeli death toll on October 7, he noted, would translate into only a death or two if scaled instead against the population of a small island nation like Tuvalu. Multiplying a tragedy by ten through a change of denominator does not sincerely change how anyone should feel about it. The 9/11 comparison, in other words, is not really a unit of measurement at all. It is a rhetorical device built to borrow the emotional weight one country attaches to one day in its own history, and lend it to a different country’s grief, for an audience the speaker is hoping to move.
What the Comparison Does Not Settle
That does not make either side’s use of it cynical, exactly, and it does not settle any of the far larger questions sitting underneath this one speech. The death tolls themselves remain central to a bitter and ongoing dispute. Gaza’s Health Ministry, whose casualty figures are compiled by medical staff and have generally been treated by the United Nations and independent researchers as a reasonably reliable record, has put the Palestinian death toll since October 2023 at more than seventy-three thousand. Israel disputes how that war has been characterised and rejects the genocide allegation outright, a rejection Netanyahu repeated forcefully at the UN. New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, responded to the speech by accusing Netanyahu of repeating what he called baseless lies intended to sanitise what Mamdani has previously termed a genocide against the Palestinian people. Netanyahu, separately, still faces an outstanding arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court over allegations of crimes against humanity, which he and his government have consistently rejected as illegitimate. None of these positions is new, and none of them was resolved, or ever likely to be resolved, by a single line in a General Assembly speech.
What It Actually Means
What the sixteen 9/11s line actually accomplishes, then, is narrower than it sounds, and arguably more interesting for being narrower. It is not a piece of evidence in the genocide debate, and it does not settle any legal question before the ICC. It is a tool aimed specifically at an American audience, built from a shared national memory that very few other tragedies anywhere in the world carry the same instant emotional charge for that particular room. It worked once, powerfully, when Netanyahu first reached for it in the raw days after October 2023. Repeating it three years later, against a backdrop of tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza and a war that has reshaped the region, asks the same image to carry a great deal more weight than a single comparison can really bear, especially once an audience has seen the identical trick run in reverse, by someone arguing the opposite case with the opposite country’s numbers.
The honest answer to what it actually means, then, is not about Israel or Gaza specifically at all. It is a reminder that in any conflict fought partly in the court of international opinion, grief gets measured out in whatever unit will travel furthest, and 9/11 remains, for one particular audience, the furthest-travelling unit available. That tells you a great deal about how modern political rhetoric is built to move a room. It tells you comparatively little about whose suffering, in the end, was greater.
References:
- Gray News (via KPTV): “Netanyahu compares Oct. 7 attacks to 16 9/11s in U.N. speech.” https://www.kptv.com
- Yahoo News / Snopes: “Fact Check: Netanyahu compared Oct. 7 attack to '16 9/11s'.” https://www.yahoo.com
- PolitiFact: “Joy Reid compares deaths in Gaza, 9/11 deaths.” https://www.politifact.com
- PBS NewsHour (AP): “Palestinian death toll in Gaza tops 73,000, officials say, as Israel strikes despite ceasefire.” https://www.pbs.org
- Wikipedia: “Gaza genocide.” https://en.wikipedia.org