Kamal Ghorui
It was a picture that hooked me to the screen and held me hostage.
A drone shot of countless graves, lined in almost perfect, haunting symmetry. Small graves for children. Killed in an attack on their school in Iran’s Minab. I kept staring at the photo far longer than normal. Unable to scroll past it or look away. What was more unsettling was how familiar it felt.
For nearly three years, similar pictures from Gaza have appeared with relentless frequency, damaged hospitals, collapsed residential buildings, and schools turned into sites of death by Israel. Again and again. The geographies are different, but the pattern of violence is not. Nor is the pattern of response. The images provoke outrage, statements follow, and then the world moves on. What remains is a quiet, growing sense that such violence, however disturbing, is no longer unexpected but normal.
For some, this familiarity is recent. For others, like me, it is not.
I grew up in Kashmir in the 1990s, where violence was not an interruption to daily life but part of the structure. In that environment, ordinary decisions were shaped by risk. Our school was chosen less for its academic reputation and more for how close it was to home. Distance was not an inconvenience, it was exposure. Going to school wasn’t just about learning and making friends, but also about the quiet, unspoken question: Will we make it back home today? News of encounters or sudden firing could change the course of a day without a warning.
And yet, even within that uncertainty, there was a kind of clarity. Violence was never seen as normal. There was an underlying belief that what we were living through was an exception, that there had been better times, and that beyond our immediate world, things worked differently, with more order, more accountability and more respect for the living. That belief may have been fragile, but it allowed us to hope.
Looking back, that hope was shaped as much by distance as by belief. Information travelled slowly then. What happened in places like ours did not always travel far, and when it did, it arrived delayed, incomplete. Expectations of accountability were limited, but so was the visibility of violence itself. The world felt far away, and perhaps because of that, it was still possible to imagine it as a better space.
It is that distance, and the comfort in that which feels harder to hold on to now.
Israel’s attacks on civilians and civilian spaces in Gaza over the past three years, and now the strike on a school in Minab, do not just add to a list of tragedies. They force a more uncomfortable question: the systems meant to regulate violence in some legal, political and even moral way, are they working? At all? What is perhaps more troubling than the violence itself is the unevenness in how it is acknowledged. Similar acts in different places are described differently, debated differently, and pursued with very different levels of urgency.
In some ways, this unevenness is not new. Earlier too, violence was often acknowledged but rarely followed by meaningful accountability. But there is a difference now. Today, nothing is hidden. Images from Gaza and Minab are immediate, continuous, impossible to ignore. They are everywhere, in real time. And yet, even with that kind of visibility, the response feels strangely familiar. The outrage rises, then fades. And the cycle repeats. Nothing of which is normal.
For those of us who have lived through conflict, this is not just something we observe. It is something we live and carry. The images from Minab did not feel distant to me. They came back as something else, not a clear memory, but a feeling.
I was in Class 4 or 5 when we heard a gunshot outside our school in the afternoon. Sharp. Close. Before we could make sense of it, more followed, rapid, relentless. We dropped to the floor without being told, crouching under desks, waiting. Some of us whispered. Some trembled. No one cried. We had heard gunfire before. What was different that day was how close it felt.
After half an hour or so, when it finally stopped, we were told it was “safe” to go home. Safe, even then, felt like a fragile word. We walked out together, each of us looking for a familiar face. My uncle was there, sent by my anxious grandmother. At home, she and my mother stood at the gate, waiting. Their faces carried something we were only beginning to understand, that in places like ours, the worst is never too far away. It sits quietly in the background of an ordinary day. Safety, even if it was just an illusion, came first.
Incidents like Minab become news, they are documented, debated, and then slowly replaced. But for those who have lived through similar moments, they do not stay in the past. They stay in the body. The details fade, but the feeling does not. Even today, the sound of a firecracker can make my body tense before my mind catches up. For a split second, I am that child again, bracing for something terrible. This is where the difference between witnessing and observing becomes clear. This difference is not always obvious, but it shows up over time, in how long something stays in public attention, in how it is talked about, and in whether anything comes of it. What stays with me most about growing up in conflict is not just the presence of violence, but the certainty that it was not normal. That certainty mattered. It allowed you to believe that things could change. But what feels different now is not only that violence continues unabated, but it is changing us in how we respond to it. Because it’s not just about those who are lost — it’s also about those who are left behind. The parents who wait. The families who break. We, as Kashmiris, have known too many loved ones taken from us, to know that pain. None of which is normal at all.
The images from Gaza and Minab are not just records of what has happened. They reflect something larger, a shift in how violence is seen, whose lives are valued, what the world chooses to respond to and what it learns to live with. The risk is not only that violence continues. It is that, slowly, almost without realising it, we begin to absorb it and normalise it. And the moment we do that, we lose something essential — our ability to be outraged, to grieve, to demand better, and to hope.
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