It's a truism that news organisations and audiences alike struggle to cope with more than one major international crisis at a time: if the war in Gaza wasn't a big enough story, then the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine was almost unbearable overload. But what about Syria, where 1,700 people are reported to have died in the last 10 days alone?

The uprising against Bashar al-Assad has been the biggest and longest story of what used to be known as the "Arab spring". Recently the tide of the war has turned, due to government military successes, rebel disarray, the rise of Isis jihadis in both Syria and Iraq … and persistent and crippling international divisions.

Reporting on it is difficult: Syrian visas for journalists are sporadic and access is strictly controlled. Reporting from the rebel side via Turkey is extremely dangerous. It is much easier to get into besieged Gaza, where most international news organisations are now represented. Financial and human resources are stretched.

Syria's latest toll includes 700 killed in just two days in the Homs area, and hundreds more in fighting against Isis around the oil fields of Deir al-Zor. For anyone who wants to play a macabre numbers game, the overall figures are still a smaller proportion than 800 Palestinian deaths out of a Gaza population of 1.8m.

But the levels of slaughter in Syria had become routine months before Gaza erupted. In the words of one Libyan woman: "My 10-year-old daughter asked me: 'Why did everyone forget about Syria when Gaza started?' I sadly replied: 'They forgot about Syria a long time ago.'"

The two Middle Eastern crises are separate but linked in many ways. Syria's state-controlled media has reported on air strikes and shelling by "the Zionist enemy" – the familiar language of decades of confrontation. It broadcasts images of dead Palestinian children that are grimly reminiscent of the young victims of Assad's barrel-bombing, who are not shown on state TV. In some cases photographs that originated in Aleppo have been posted on social media as if they were from Gaza, and as if the genuine ones weren't bad enough.

The latest chapter in the unequal war between Israel and the Palestinians has allowed Assad to dust off the old narrative about an "axis of resistance" that includes Syria, and its loyal allies, Iran and Hezbollah. It is worth remembering, though, that Hamas was forced to abandon its Damascus headquarters because it could not bring itself to oppose the Syrian uprising, which is one of the reasons for its current weakness, and arguably, its desperation in choosing to take on a vastly superior enemy.

Syrian hostility to its southern neighbour is real enough. Israel occupies the Golan Heights and oppresses the Palestinians (who used to live better in Syria than in any other Arab country), though Assad, like his father before him, has exploited the Palestinian cause for his own ends.

"Now that the Arab-Israeli conflict is back in the spotlight, Assad is back in his comfort zone," argues Nadim Shehadi of the Chatham House thinktank. "The regime uses the conflict to legitimise itself, and the opposition ignores it and pushes for demands unrelated to it."

Bracketing the two wars together stirs instant controversy. Commentators who are deemed to favour Israel are accused of using Syria "to distract from Israel's war crimes in Gaza" or being keen to bring Assad to account while ignoring Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. Many supporters of Palestinian resistance back the Syrian president against rebels who they characterise as jihadi fanatics who are bankrolled by sectarian and reactionary Gulf states, while ignoring the moderate and democratic elements of the opposition.

Israelis and their supporters complain about "selective outrage" and often hint at anti-semitic motives. It is unclear, however, how closer media attention to Syria, or less focus on Gaza, would help resolve the Palestinian issue, unless a solution can be found by more effective PR. Anti-Assad activists protest against a "selective internationalism" which opposes "the collective punishment and mass murder of Palestinians and Arabs in one land by one government and supporting or justifying their collective punishment and mass murder next door when a different government is the perpetrator".

To call the Syrian and Palestinian struggles "one revolution, and a freedom that is indivisible" may be a moving slogan, but it ignores the many differences between the wars. Still, they do have one important thing in common: since the collapse of UN-backed Geneva talks in February, there have been no peace negotiations about the future of Syria. The same has been true for Palestine and Israel since John Kerry's marathon mediation effort ran into the sand in April. The lesson for the international community, fatigued or bored by competing stories of Middle Eastern carnage, is that problems that are left to fester only get worse – and always take a terrible human toll.