In February 1982, a few hundred Islamist insurgents seized the city of Hama, with a population of around 250,000, in central Syria on the banks of the Orontes River. The Muslim Brotherhood had already been waging a covert insurrection against the regime of then-president Hafez Al-Assad and his Ba'ath party for over two years, but this was the first time they had managed to seize a major city.

The Syrian dictatorship had believed it had stifled the Islamist protest and was shocked, especially as dozens of Ba'athist cadres were assassinated, sometimes in atrocious circumstances. The city was quickly besieged by the regime's elite troops, who reconquered it after three weeks, but not without destroying entire neighborhoods, which were ravaged by bombardments before being bulldozed. At least a third of Hama was destroyed and the death toll was never confirmed. With hundreds of bodies buried under the rubble, estimates ranged from 10,000 to 25,000 killed and the overwhelming majority were civilians massacred collectively.

The Assad dictatorship, under first father Hafez in 1982 and then son Bashar since 2000, treats the Syrian population like an army of occupation, ready to commit the worst abuses if the status quo of its complete domination is threatened. In this sense, parallels can legitimately be drawn between the horror unleashed by the Assad regime against rebel Hama in 1982 and the equally ruthless actions of the Israeli army against Gaza, following the terrorist carnage perpetrated by Hamas in Israel on 7 October 2023.

In both cases, the aim is to use extreme violence to restore a form of "deterrence" against a perceived existential Islamist threat. In both cases, the city is methodically ransacked as the focus of such a threat. In both cases, the civilian population pays an exorbitant price for these "reprisals," which resemble collective punishment.

The differences between the two bloodbaths are also nevertheless obvious. The killings in Hama were not revealed to the outside world until well after the Assad regime's final assault, without any images being broadcast, hence the uncertainty of the death toll. Gaza's agony has been unfolding live for the past five and a half months, with a flood of overwhelming and indisputable images on social media.

Assad crushed the insurgent city with his own troops, taking care not to involve his loyal Soviet ally, while the Israeli offensive against Gaza can only continue thanks to the unfailing military support of the US. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), for all its cynicism, would never have dared to describe its support for the Assad dictatorship as "humanitarian," while Washington delivers assistance by sea and air to a hunger-stricken enclave only to preserve the Israeli army's freedom of action in its ground operations.

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