Every day, it seems, we hear fresh horror from Gaza. An Israeli attack has destroyed a school or shelter, with civilians killed.

Americans, whether for or against Israel, face the question: How can you defend such carnage?

You can’t. There’s no good way to defend the killing of innocents, but we should consider the context when condemning Israel.

Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel killed about 1140 Israelis, and Hamas took some 250 hostages back to Gaza.

Oct. 7 has been called Israel’s 9/11, but that grossly understates the scale of the attack.

Israel has roughly 10 million people. The United States, 335,000,000. On 9/11, we lost about 3,000 people. For the United States to suffer a comparable attack to Oct. 7, nearly 40,000 Americans would need to die, with another 8,000 taken hostage.

Imagine if Mexican militants were to pour across our border, murder some 40,000 people and take 8,000 hostages.

How would Americans react to such slaughter? It beggars the imagination. Nothing would be off the table. No number of Mexican dead would be considered excessive. And we wouldn’t care if other countries disagreed.

Look at our past wars.

Death counts vary widely, but during the Vietnam War, we killed tens of thousands of civilians. We dropped 388,000 tons of napalm.

Yet Vietnam neither attacked us nor presented a threat. Our reason was essentially an abstraction — that if North Vietnam won, communism would spread throughout Asia and beyond. In the half-century since our withdrawal, that hasn’t come to pass.

The United States launched two wars after 9/11. We understand the rationale for Afghanistan, however badly the war was managed. We were attacked by al-Qaida, an extremist group based in that country.

Iraq is another story. Twenty years on, we’re still debating why we even went to war. That tells you a lot. It’s clear that much of the rationale for that war rested on falsehoods.

But if the reasons remain murky, the results are not. According to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, somewhere between 280,000 and 315,000 civilians “died from direct war-related violence caused by the U.S., its allies, the Iraqi military and police, and opposition forces.”

Yet neither the Vietnam nor Iraq wars, unlike Israel’s assault in Gaza, were responses to existential threats to the United States. Or any threat beyond the theoretical.

Consider another perspective. Imagine Ukraine murdered thousands of Russian civilians and took hostages. Russia, of course, would respond.

Imagine further Ukraine taking losses on the level of the Palestinians in Gaza. President Vladimir Zelensky, however, refuses to surrender. Let’s add that Zelensky is making these decisions living out of harm’s way, as are current leaders of Hamas.

Could Zelensky count on support from Americans?

Not likely. Zelensky would face enormous international pressure — in the name of humanity — to surrender and return the hostages. There would be little sympathy. The reaction would be, “You poked the bear. You’re on your own.”

Much of the Gaza coverage suggests that Palestinians are powerless to end Israel’s attacks. That’s not quite true. They have the power to surrender. They have the power to return the hostages. They have the power to renounce their stated goal of destroying Israel.

Which leaves Israel in a quandary. How do you make peace with an opponent whose ultimate goal is the elimination of your country and your people? How do you force an opponent to the negotiating table when they count every life and battle lost as another victory?

As a story in The Atlantic on Hamas’ strategy was headlined, “For Hamas, Everything is Going According to Plan.” They figure they’re winning.

Israel and its government are not above criticism. But critics need to consider: In a similar situation, what would the United States do? In far less serious situations, what has the United States done?

Don Flood (don.g.flood@gmail.com) is a retired editor and columnist for the Dover Post and Cape Gazette in Delaware. He lives in Delaware and spent much of his life on the Eastern Shore.