HOW long can we keep scrolling past the decapitated bodies constantly appearing on our telephone screens?

We have the options of closing our eyes, or moving on to something more edifying like the picture of a cat, or simply turning off our phones altogether.

I don’t hold the view that seeing the real impact of war on our screens somehow desensitises us or makes us less caring.

In fact all the evidence that I’ve seen is that the vast majority of people care very much about what is happening to the Palestinians in Gaza and probably would feel the same about other mass murders taking place in places like Sudan if there was more coverage of that and the other around 40 conflicts taking place around the globe.

My feeling is that most people - just on a simple human level - felt the pain experienced by the families of the people killed last October 7 in Gaza - whoever it turns out was responsible for each death.

The seemingly indiscriminate killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians by the Israelis has also rightly drawn widespread condemnation from millions who have protested and many more who have never considered that walking in a demonstration was an option for them.

The images of destroyed bodies or parents crying over the body of yet another dead or dying child has, I believe, helped to keep in focus what British military support means in practice.

What we often forget, as the latest dying person flashes onto our screens, is that, firstly, someone has filmed that image and secondly they have to live with that image in their head for the rest of their life.

The earliest images of war that I remember being aware of is from the Bayeux Tapestry which, of course, tells the story of the Norman conquest of Britain including the famous Battle of Hastings in 1066.

Like so much of history, this amazing piece of propaganda was done from the standpoint of the victor. This makes some of the so-called facts at times unreliable but what is clear from the battle scenes is that it depicts some extremely gruesome stuff.

The book, and what I’m told is the excellent recent movie All Quiet on the Western Front, is a notable exception to this. Coming from the standpoint of the losers, there is a clear depiction of the horrors of war.

The unsurpassed war time writing of the great Martha Gelhorn from both the Spanish Civil War and World War II paint a picture of the horrific realities of combat.

Gelhorn once said: “War happens to people one by one. Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business.”

War was once something that you could choose to watch reported on the news at 6 on the BBC, 7 on Channel 4, 9 again on the BBC or with Trevor Macdonald at 10. It is now even more than the 24 hour news cycle that developed as we started to get more channels. You can now sign up to news channels on social media and, if you choose, receive constant news alerts on your phone or your watch.

The news is now relentless, inescapable and live.

It is also now being told not from someone coming in from the outside - who usually has the option of leaving but by the people themselves.

One of the great war correspondents of more recent times, the late Marie Colvin, said: “Craters. Burnt houses. Women weeping for sons and daughters. Suffering. In my profession, there is no chance of unemployment. The real difficulty is having enough faith in humanity to believe that someone will care.”

I have heard my comrade, the journalist and activist, Vijay Prashad, describe war as dirty and very loud. Another fantastic journalist, who Prashad worked with, the late Robert Fisk, adds another sense to this.

He vividly describes in his posthumously published recent book, Night of Power, how “in Baghdad, the smell of the dead poured into the street through the mortuary’s air conditioning ducts.

“There was a wail of grief from the yard behind us where 50 people waited in the shade of the mortuary wall.

“There were wooden coffins in the street, stacked against the wall, lying on the pavement. When the bodies were released, they were taken to the mosque in coffins and then buried in shrouds.”

I never want to know the smell of death.

Every day I write about mounting death tolls in wars across the world but, to be honest, it rarely crosses my mind, as I concentrate on producing copy for the paper, that those killed must be buried somewhere or somehow and that the fighting rarely stops for that very human necessity of saying farewell to our loved ones to take place.

Fisk talks of how in the “blazing heat” of Baghdad “some families buried their dead without notifying the authorities. Some bodies remained unidentified and there are no autopsies.”

As a journalist and activist the question I now more frequently ask myself is what contribution can I make towards not just getting people beyond our paper’s usual readership to care but what can I do to spark them to want to mobilise for change.

I don't want to just improve the way that I write about the wars that are taking place. I want to help people to see, hear and feel differently about the wars and spur them to even the smallest action of opposition to war.

I am sure there are people reading this who will be able to give me advice on how I am looking at this in the wrong way or, more unusually, be prepared to join the conversation about what more we can all do to build a mobilisation that stretches beyond when the terrible images stop appearing on our screens.

One thing is for sure. I will never describe myself as a war reporter. I have never been to a war zone and have absolutely no desire to do so.

I might, at a stretch, describe myself as a peace journalist because that is what I am most interested in. Where are the peacemongers and how can their voices be amplified above the wailing voices of the warmongers?

The best ways of stopping the terrible images of war from scrolling across our screen is, frankly, to stop the wars and to stop selling the weapons that allow nations to wage wars.

I have always been proud that our newspaper is for “Peace and Socialism.” The only national daily newspaper that can be relied upon to always take an anti-war stance and to explain the often multiple interests that are behind these conflicts.

John Reed, the author of the classic book about the Russian revolution, Ten Days That Shook The World, is shown in the film Reds, whether fiction or not, being asked at a posh lunch a question about what was behind the war in Mexico that he had been covering as a journalist. He stood up and said “profits” and sat back down again.

That’s usually a safe answer behind the reason for most wars but I doubt that really is the foremost thing of interest for people being bombed and shot at and seeing their families and friends die around them.

They expect us to build a lasting anti war movement. I believe that journalists, alongside many other activists, have a key role to play in that by placing ourselves firmly on the side of the victims of war and not being stenographers for those who champion war from the safety of their armchairs at home.