“Hama Rules” is a phrase coined by American journalist Thomas Friedman in his 1989 book From Beirut to Jerusalem to describe the doctrine of political violence demonstrated by the Assad regime’s destruction of the city of Hama in February 1982. The phrase captures the idea that in certain political contexts, challenges to state authority will be met with overwhelming, annihilating force, without regard for civilian casualties or proportionality. The phrase derives from the massacre that established the doctrine: the three-week Syrian army assault on Hama’s old city following a Muslim Brotherhood uprising, which killed between ten and forty thousand people and destroyed whole neighbourhoods. The massacre was conducted in near-total information silence — no foreign journalists, no cameras, no international observers. The lesson it taught Syrian society was that the regime would apply total force against any challenge, and that the outside world would not intervene. The phrase is sometimes used reductively to imply that all Middle Eastern politics operates by this logic — a generalisation critics regard as both analytically imprecise and culturally reductive. Whatever its limitations, it names something real about the specific doctrine the Assad regime demonstrated in 1982 and applied again, in a transformed information environment, in 2011–24.