What role does Syria play in the Hamas-Israel conflict?

Syrian activists who took part in anti-government demonstrations in their own country were horrified to see Syrian President Bashar Assad show up in the Saudi capital last weekend for a special summit on the Hamas-Israel conflict. After over a decade of war, they consider the Syrian dictator responsible for some of the worst brutality back home: the displacement of millions, the torture of thousands and an estimated half a million people dead.

"Assad's speech at the meetings in Riyadh about the situation in Gaza might win a prize for the world's most hypocritical moment," Celine Kassem, an activist and communications officer working for the Washington-based Syrian Emergency Task Force, told DW.

On Saturday, Assad gave a speech in Saudi Arabia as part of a special summit that brought together members of the regional cooperation body, the Arab League, and members of the global Organization of Islamic Cooperation. At the meeting, Arab leaders argued that Israel was flouting international humanitarian laws and accused the country of committing war crimes against the civilians of Gaza. In his talk, the Syrian dictator criticized normalization agreements between other Middle Eastern countries and Israel.

Israel has been bombing the Gaza Strip since an October 7 attack by the Hamas militant group on Israel that resulted in around 1,200 Israeli deaths. The death toll in Gaza after a month of bombardment stands at more than 11,000 according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza. On the weekend, a senior US diplomat suggested the Gaza death toll was likely much higher than even that.

"I was disgusted to see such a war criminal, a person with such a dark history, talking about these troubling things," said Ibrahim Zeidan, a journalist and activist based in Idlib, an area in northern Syria controlled by the Syrian opposition. "During his speech, I remembered [Syrians] being targeted with chemical weapons, seeing children and civilians unable to breathe — and without any medical help because all the hospitals in Khan Shaykhun (in southern Idlib) had been bombed that day."

It wasn't just Syrians either, Kassem added. Assad's forces also besieged and bombed Palestinians who previously sought refuge in Syria, a country that once championed the idea of a state for Palestinians.

Complex Syrian-Palestinian ties

Syria's relationship with the Palestinians, and the Hamas group, is long and complicated.

For example, Hamas' origins lie in the trans-national Muslim Brotherhood group, which believes politics should be guided by religion and which undertakes social welfare and community activities, but also has an armed wing.

In Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood opposed the Assad family's decades-long hold on power. In 1982, while Bashar Assad's father, Hafez, was in power, Syrian troops put down a revolt led by the Muslim Brotherhood in the central Syrian city of Hama, killing between an estimated 10,000 and 30,000 locals.

Later, the Syrian government took pride in supporting the Palestinian cause, one which has always been close to many locals' hearts. Damascus became a refuge for Palestinians fleeing Israel and home to around half a million of them. Syria also hosted one of Hamas' leaders-in-exile, Khaled Mashaal, for years. This was despite the fact that the Assad family often found itself at odds with Hamas, even while it used the group to further its own foreign policy aims.

However in 2012, when the peaceful Syrian revolution began to turn into a bloody civil war, the relationship soured. The Hamas group refused to take sides in the country's uprising and its former leader Mashaal left for Qatar, where he still lives today. 

Besieged enclave in Damascus

During the civil war, as Syrian activist Kassem pointed out, Syrian government forces deliberately targeted Palestinian civilians in the Yarmouk district, a neighborhood that had evolved from a Palestinian refugee camp to a Palestinian-majority neighborhood. After anti-government rebels took control of Yarmouk, Assad's forces besieged it, preventing food, power, medicine and other supplies from entering. Because of the fact that nobody could get in or out, many called it "Syria's Gaza" at the time.

Late last year, after Assad was invited back to the Arab League after a decade's suspension, Hamas and the Syrian regime reconciled too. The Arab League had suspended Syria because of the civil war but in 2022, saw no other solution but to deal directly with the Assad government again in order to maintain regional stability.

Still, there are still many signs that Hamas and Assad do not trust one another, Samuel Ramani, an associate fellow at British security-focused think tank, the Royal United Services Institute, wrote in an analysis last week.

Where does the Assad regime stand now?

After the summit in Riyadh, participating countries released a joint statement. They called for a ceasefire and the end of Israel's siege of Gaza, so that power, water, food, medicine and other supplies could be delivered. They also urged the International Criminal Court to investigate "war crimes and crimes against humanity that Israel is committing" in the Palestinian territories.

The Syrian government also signed the resolution. However, other than that, it has not really played a major role in the current conflict.

"Although the Syrian regime … has expressed solidarity with Gaza, it has refrained from large scale escalations against Israel," Ramani explained. "The Syrian regime's response to the Gaza war has featured strident rhetoric but restrained action, as it does not wish to assume political and security risks on Hamas' behalf."

Up until now Syria has confined military action against Israel to sporadic cross-border shelling and rocket attacks on the occupied Golan Heights, Ramani said. But these have been going on for years anyway.

The Israeli military has continued to fire rockets at Syrian airports in Damascus and Aleppo, putting them out of use, ostensibly to prevent incoming fighters or arms from Iran. But Israel has not tried to take out Syrian or Russian military targets. The US has hit what it says are Iranian bases in Syria.

Syrian government 'very weak'

In an interview with the website, Syria Direct,  Joseph Daher, a professor at the European University Institute and expert on Syria, pointed out that the Syrian government is actually a "very weak ... passive actor" without much of its own military strength. The Assad government only really survived the civil war thanks to military support and intervention from Iran and Russia.

While the Syrian government itself is unlikely to take much action, various militias operating inside the country, supported by Iran, could. These act almost independently of the Syrian government.

Right now though, analysts suggest, nobody seems to wants that.

"Despite the succession of strikes and counterstrikes, neither side — the US and Israel, on one hand, and Iran and the groups it supports, on the other — appears to want a major regional escalation," researchers from the think tank, International Crisis Group, argued in an analysis published late last week. "But as the war in Gaza goes on, the risk of exactly that will continue to increase."

For Syrian activists, displaced or in exile and still fighting for justice, they believe everything that is happening in the Middle East should be seen as connected. Some have argued that letting the Assad regime get away with crimes against humanity, such as bombing hospitals, killing journalists and launching chemical weapons attacks, has led to the degradation of the whole system of international humanitarian law.

Assad's presence at last weekend's regional event and at others, "is a painful reminder of the ongoing struggle for peace and justice in our region," the Idlib-based journalist Zeidan told DW. "And it should remind us all of the need for justice and accountability for the terrible things that happened in Syria."

Edited by: Rob Mudge