An effective way to understand the extent to which the Hamas attack was catastrophic for Israel is to look at the death toll. Israel has not suffered so many losses, especially among the civilian population, in decades, at least since the Yom Kippur War in 1973. The current number of deaths is over 700, but it is likely that the number will continue to rise.
The extraordinary nature of this event is clearly visible in the graphic below: Over the past 13 years, Israeli deaths caused by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have always been on the order of no more than a few dozen per year, almost all of them caused by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Palestinian conflict killed in improvised terrorist attacks or by rocket fire from the Gaza Strip. On the contrary, Palestinian deaths have always been much higher, with peaks corresponding to the last two wars between Israel and Hamas, that of 2014 and that of 2021. However, currently the ratio between Israeli and Palestinian deaths is reversed.
The last comparable event in terms of death toll was the Second Intifada, a major Palestinian armed uprising marked by attacks against Israelis and terrorist attacks. During the Second Intifada, approximately 1,000 Israelis died, including 700 civilians and 300 soldiers, while more than 3,000 Palestinians were killed. However, the Second Intifada was an extremely long event, lasting about five years, from 2000 to 2005, and is not comparable to Hamas’ single armed attack on Saturday.
– Also read: The live blog about the attack on Israel