L’arithmétique de Netanyahou : seize fois le 9/11 et l’autoroute d’Ayalon
https://sonar21.com/netanyahus-arithmetic-sixteen-9-11s-and-the-ayalon-highway/
Benjamin Netanyahu has a talent for round numbers, and for knowing which audience gets which one.
On the night of October 17, 2024, after Israeli soldiers stumbled on Yahya Sinwar in Rafah and killed him, the prime minister recorded two statements. In Hebrew, he called Sinwar the mass murderer “who murdered thousands of Israelis.” In English, a little later, his office preferred a smaller noun: “Sinwar’s terrorists murdered in cold blood 1,200 people.” Same prime minister, same night, same dead man. The Hebrew audience got thousands. The foreigners got the figure that could survive a fact-checker.
At the United Nations last month, the 1,200 went back to work. “Altogether, they slaughtered 1,200 Israelis that day,” Netanyahu told the General Assembly. Then he multiplied it by the ratio of America’s population to Israel’s: “this is equal to 40,000 innocent Americans slaughtered in less than 24 hours. That’s 16 times 9/11.” The arithmetic is doing a lot of work. The bodies are not.
Counting the murdered
“Murdered” usually means civilians: people killed in their homes, on buses, at a music festival. So count the civilians, and leave out the soldiers who died fighting wars Israel also fought.
Start with Hezbollah. In the 2006 war, its rockets killed 43 Israeli civilians, 45 if you include the heart attacks. That’s the Foreign Ministry’s figure, not a critic’s. About 120 soldiers also died in that war. Since October 2023, Hezbollah’s rockets and drones have killed a few dozen more civilians in the north, including the 12 children at Majdal Shams. A published tally through late 2024 puts Hezbollah’s civilian toll at roughly 90 to 100 across a quarter century. The often-cited figure of 134 Israelis killed on the Lebanon front through October 2025 includes soldiers.
Hamas is the larger entry. Israel’s National Insurance Institute counted 809 civilians killed on October 7, 2023, excluding soldiers and members of the kibbutz security squads. The Gaza wars before that killed Israeli civilians in the single digits each time: three in 2008-09, a handful in 2012, six in 2014, a few more in 2021. Add them up, and the civilian toll from Hamas-led attacks outside the Second Intifada comes to about 800 to 830.
Even the 809 needs an asterisk. Hamas’s assault began with military targets: the Erez crossing, the Re’im base and the Nahal Oz outpost. It also struck the kibbutzim and the Nova festival, and not every Israeli who died there was killed by Hamas. A “very senior” IDF source confirmed to Haaretz that the army invoked the Hannibal Directive that morning, and that all forces in the area were given permission to fire at anyone approaching the border, without restriction. An Israeli police investigation found that an IDF helicopter firing on the attackers at the festival apparently also hit some of the revelers. At Kibbutz Be’eri, Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram ordered a tank to fire on a house where Hamas fighters were holding 14 Israelis; only one survived. An Israeli Air Force probe concluded that Efrat Katz, 68, of Nir Oz was likely killed by helicopter fire while being abducted. How many of October 7’s dead fell to Israeli fire has never been established. A government that won’t say is in no position to round up.
The intifada is where a hurried speaker finds the rest of his thousands. Between late 2000 and 2005, Palestinian armed groups killed roughly 740 to 890 Israeli civilians. Suicide bombings, which killed about 515, were roughly 40% Hamas, 26% Islamic Jihad and 26% Fatah. Hamas was the largest faction. It was not the whole war. Crediting every bus bombing of 2002 to Hamas is how a speech gets from 800 to “thousands” without any new funerals.
Who actually does the killing
I have made this point before, using the Israeli government’s own data and the State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism, which my old office produced. It bears repeating, because Netanyahu’s arithmetic depends on readers never checking either.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry’s own record of victims of Palestinian violence, covering 2000 through April 2024 and excluding October 7, counts 1,552 Israelis killed in 24 years. Roughly three-quarters of those deaths fall in the Second Intifada years, and the violence has trended down since 2003. Only about 15% of the attacks in that record are attributed to Hamas, acting alone or with another faction. The rockets, the image most associated with Hamas and Hezbollah, have killed on the order of 50 to 75 people across 2001 to 2025, despite thousands launched. None of this makes Hamas a peace movement. It does mean the organization was never the engine of ceaseless slaughter that the speeches describe.
The global record tells the same story. Year after year, the groups responsible for the most terrorist attacks and deaths worldwide are Sunni Salafi-jihadist organizations: al-Qaeda and its affiliates, the Islamic State and its provinces, al-Shabaab, Boko Haram. Before 2023, neither Hamas nor Hezbollah ranked among the groups responsible for the most attacks worldwide. They entered the top ten only in 2023, because of the war with Israel. Two organizations routinely described as among the world’s most prolific terrorists did not, until three years ago, make the list of the world’s most prolific terrorists.
The indecent comparison, which is also the ordinary one
Now set those numbers next to something Israelis die from every day.
Between January 2000 and September 2026, about 10,500 to 10,900 people were killed in traffic crashes in Israel. The toll was 461 in 2000, peaked in the mid-500s in 2001 and 2002, and fell to 290 at its low point in 2012. It has been climbing since: 439 in 2024, and 459 in 2025, the deadliest year on Israeli roads in two decades. By mid-September of this year, more than 300 more had died. Israel’s road death rate last year was almost twice Britain’s.
Set side by side, the roads have killed about ten times as many Israelis as Hamas’s documented civilian toll, and about a hundred times as many as Hezbollah’s. No prime minister has described the commute as sixteen 9/11s. No one has called the Ministry of Transport the heir of the Nazis. The dead on the Ayalon Highway are simply dead, which is apparently a different category.
By the prime minister’s own method, then, the most prolific terrorist threat in Israel is not Hamas, not Hezbollah and not Tehran. It is the automobile. It has killed more Israelis since 2000 than every Palestinian faction combined. It operates in every city, crosses every checkpoint unchallenged, and recruits openly at dealerships with zero-percent financing. It has no charter, no ideology and no foreign sponsor, unless you count Toyota.
The policy implications are obvious. If 1,200 dead justifies a war without end, 10,000 dead demands at least as much. The security cabinet should designate the private car a terrorist organization and ban Israelis from driving, effective immediately. The Ayalon should be declared a closed military zone. The Shin Bet can open a desk for Mazda. The prime minister can go on television and vow total victory over the Corolla, and promise that no sedan will ever again threaten the citizens of Israel. If anyone objects that this is absurd, he will have grasped the point.
Of course, it is absurd. This is not a claim that a crash and a massacre are the same thing. A rocket aimed at a town is a crime. A truck aimed at nothing in particular is a policy failure. The deliberate killing of civilians is a crime. The point is narrower. The rhetoric of annihilation, of an enemy bent on extinguishing the Jewish people, sits on top of a civilian death toll that doesn’t match the sentence once soldiers are separated out and other factions’ attacks aren’t credited to Hamas.
What the numbers are for
Why inflate? Because “thousands” justifies things that “800” might not. Between 2000 and the eve of October 7, Israel killed an estimated 11,200 to 11,500 Palestinians. Since then, the toll in Gaza has passed 73,000, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. “Thousands” frames that as proportionate self-defense against an existential threat. It turns a terrorist organization into a civilizational enemy and makes every objection sound like indifference to Jewish lives. And for a domestic audience, it turns the worst intelligence and military failure in Israel’s history, on Netanyahu’s watch, into a story about the enemy rather than the government.
Netanyahu’s English text already knows the real number. It says 1,200. His Hebrew eulogy for Sinwar said thousands. The distance between those two numbers is the distance between a casualty list and a speech. One of them has names on it. The other has a microphone.
Colonel Wilkerson and I had a good chat with Randy Credico on his show, Live on the Fly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s4bNwwwwPo&t=1s
Nima and I discussed the latest Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2eLbMCkkzc&t=1s
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