US-Israel War On Iran: How We, The Reporters, Watched The War Live

The custodians of power in the United States have spoken—and this time, they did not mince words. There seemed little concern about the implications, as President Donald Trump said that a “whole civilization will die tonight.”

Amidst warnings of evacuations, world leaders convened emergency meetings, fears of a nuclear war began to seep in, and in Iran, people formed human chains, ready to be martyred alongside their President. World peace was dependent on a deadline Trump announced, "Eastern Time." 

At Outlook, we watch this unfold from a distance, yet closer than ever before—verifying, staying accurate, balanced, timely. Holding our ground in the face of a mammoth challenge, as giants like the US and Israel level Iran and Lebanon.

At the eleventh hour, a two-week ceasefire offered a narrow opening for negotiations. But this war in West Asia has unfolded in unsettling ways, AI-generated propaganda, erratic statements, and a flood of memes blurring the lines between reality, sensitivity and spectacle.

And we are covering all of it at Outlook. In our pages, we dissect the consequences of what is definitely the closest our world has come to a global war in decades, tracing not just the battles on the ground, but the narratives, the distortions, and the toll that keeps mounting.

A War That Is Live

Chinki Sinha

I can’t sleep. I have just seen images of people in Iran forming human chains around bridges and power plants knowing that they might be killed in the bombings by the United States and Israel. It is that suspension of disbelief as I watch the war online. Live. This is carnage. This is genocide. This is losing all innocence, all hope. 

As journalists, we are to keep calm, to be objective but how does one deal with the onslaught to our own belief in institutions and in leaders. What are we to do? A handful of us are awake. We continue to scan and search news, updates, anything. All images of war can hurt. And we must be. We are humans and we are witnesses. 

We are not a big team. We are a few of us. Maybe we are those few who care about news, about fairness, about those who are standing guard and watching the skies unleash horror on their country. 

It is one of those rare moments in a newsroom when a lone person says she is about to close the blog and we ask for others to help and they all come and join in and the blog is up again with the conviction that that we are doing whatever we can to at least be around for whoever is reading, listening, watching.

This is a newsroom. All hands on deck moment. This is home. And to all my colleagues who are relentlessly updating the news, watching everything that can lead to distrust in the world leaders and institutions, witnessing injustice grow bigger in scale, and yet, unfazed they carry on for the sake of people, they are the ones who guard the sacred place that’s called a newsroom. 

I am humbled that I have such courageous colleagues. We can at least say we were up that night when the war was waged against Iran to end a civilisation by the United States President Mr. Donald Trump and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu while the world watched in silence or in fear. We watched in horror.

When Reporting Becomes Witnessing

Zenaira Bakhsh

Having grown up in Kashmir, where politics is not an abstraction but a condition of everyday life, places like Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran were never distant geographies to me, they were intimate, almost familial presences in the moral imagination I inherited. That proximity has only deepened over time, first as a young person trying to make sense of violence and loss, and later as a journalist documenting lives being steadily unravelled. What much of the Western and Indian mainstream media hesitates to name, we have watched unfold in fragments and testimonies that resist euphemism. To follow these stories is not a professional beat alone; it has become a ritual, waking and sleeping with a quiet, persistent prayer for people I have never met, yet feel bound to.

Reporting, in this context, rarely ends with publication. It extends into the silences that follow, the unanswered messages, the anxious refresh of news feeds, the fragile relief of a reply that simply confirms someone is still alive. I find myself reaching out not just for quotes, but for reassurance; not just as a reporter, but as someone unwilling to reduce people to datelines and death tolls. The act of waiting becomes its own kind of labour, threaded with dread, as each update threatens to carry another account of how systematically people are being dehumanised. There are moments when I have to pull away from the screen, not out of detachment but self-preservation, reminding myself that while my first instinct is to bear witness, I am not immune to what I witness. And yet, even in sleep, the images persist, sharpening into a quiet, lingering anxiety.

In one recent exchange, a 24-year-old Palestinian I had interviewed sent me a message that read: “My heart is with you, your family, your people there.” It is difficult to articulate what it means to receive such generosity of spirit from someone living under relentless siege. If anything, it unsettles the assumed direction of empathy. In those moments, strength is redefined, not as endurance alone, but as the ability to extend care outward even when one’s own world is collapsing. To say that such encounters have reshaped my understanding of resilience would be insufficient; they have, instead, reoriented the very terms on which I understand humanity.

What we have witnessed over the past few years is, at best, a partial glimpse into realities that have stretched across decades for those living under occupation and bombardment. As a reporter, the act of going the extra mile, staying up late, following leads across time zones, piecing together stories from interrupted lives, often feels inadequate in the face of that scale. And yet, it is also the minimum that must be done. The anxiety, when it comes, arrives later, in the quiet recognition of one’s own relative safety, of the privilege of distance, of the ability to step away when others cannot. To sit in a safe home, with access to food and water, while writing about those denied even these basics, is to confront an uncomfortable moral dissonance.

But perhaps that is precisely where the responsibility lies. To insist, again and again, that these lives are not peripheral, not expendable, not abstractions. To write in a way that resists erasure. Because if journalism means anything in moments like these, it is not just the act of reporting facts, it is the refusal to let people be reduced to them.

How Is Any Of This Real?

⁩Anwiti Singh

The fact that the US killed over 160 schoolgirls in Iran and got away with it will haunt me forever. Surreal, absurd, like a kind of purgatory— that is what it feels like to report on the current US–Israel war on Iran. 

Are we a simulation in some alien kid’s video game in a galaxy far away because is any of this real? War crimes being announced in advance, brown people being animals to justify their bombings by powerful White men?

How can a President of a country, albeit a powerful one, decide to kidnap another country’s president, kill a Supreme Leader, kill thousands, displace millions and still sit on a moral high horse? Why is the world so afraid of Israel and USA that we cannot prevent little children from being blown up to pieces? I shouldn’t get emotional or sound biased, because I am a journalist, but what else can you do? So you watch these horrors, then blur it while posting so the audience is not traumatised as well. And so the White-men controlled algorithms don’t block you for simply showing the truth. 

I can take the many unhinged rants of a president and write a short story on it, as people make memes, and we argue on the very real possibility of children in Tehran being vaporised into nothingness by a nuclear attack. 

The footage of Minab school does not leave me. Pink shoes, once white, now stained with blood. A child’s blown-up hand. A small bone jutting out of the ground. If it disturbs me this much, from a whole continent between us, how are Iranians living with it? 

But we have to write, and report, and know the saying ‘a pen is mightier than the sword’ is wrong. Nothing is as powerful as man drunk on power, allied with a country hell-bent on ethnic cleansing and colonisation, armed with the world’s most destructive weapons and backing from all the other superpowers. 

Is the USA so morally bankrupt? Does no one, neither opposition nor Republicans, find this terrorism repugnant? And it is terrorism.

I feel guilty to be part of an industry that refuses to call a genocide a genocide, or terrorism terrorism. I am at least thankful to Outlook for allowing us to report facts, not parrot US–Israel press handouts. That we can call out the moral bankruptcy of the supposed developed world, which stayed silent on Gaza being flattened, but got up in arms when oil supply was delayed. Trump is ready to obliterate a civilisation and we are okay with that. We can just do a short story on it, publish it, and pray to the universe the children of Tehran are not vapourised in a nuclear attack because a drunk on power, rape accused man feels the need to show off his dominance. 

The world watches it like a film, not reality. Waiting for interval. For the end. Helpless. The script is written. They cannot change it. The so-called Western morality is broken. The myth of the USA is shattered.

And we, once colonised ourselves, still fail to see the pattern.

The War In A Pause

Agnideb Bandyopadhyay 

What does it mean to cover war from a distance? To watch it unfurl in a maddening rhythm? I say rhythm because news follows a pattern - where I have often seen a pause dictate the flow. Where newsrooms across the world look at each other’s last updates, poking their correspondent to take the first jump. A regimented pause. Miles away from ground zero, the temporary lull between two breaking points would be a good time to cool down and remind yourself that you are doing your best to saddle the horse. And deal with the overwhelming nature of information. In a world desensitised to violence, what we often forget to do, is think. Think beyond the pegs, updates, the numbers, and reactions. Covering a war from afar made me think - of worlds so distant and yet so close. Of suffering so strange, and yet so numbingly personal. Of my life, so removed from cries and shrieks of children and women. Removed from the school which once heard girls laughing and yet attached. From the bridges which held promise, the roads which forged history. While that very lull helps me to take a necessary break, it probably helps them scurry to another shelter, hold their children tighter, rummage through the rubbles to find the faint cry. To play a part, a tiny speck, in this world of news, makes me proud. But more than that, it makes me think, for a minute more. About the faces beyond the numbers, the sounds beyond the updates, the disbelief behind the carefully curated headlines. The war reached me in the pause when every single person in the newsroom was negotiating with theirs. The war was not probably ours, but the pause was.

Don't let the world move on too quickly

Mrinalini Dhyani 

This is a time when war no longer feels distant, even if it is unfolding thousands of miles away. We are living in such a time, a time when devastation arrives not through dispatches alone, but through the glow of our phone screens. Entire cities, broken homes, children pulled out of rubble, all of it fits into the palm of our hands. And yet, in the same moment, with the same thumb, we can scroll past it. That is perhaps the most unsettling reality of this age: war is both everywhere and frighteningly easy to move beyond. As a reporter covering this conflict from afar, that contradiction sits heavily with me every single day. There is a constant tension between proximity and distance. I am not on the ground hearing the explosions myself, and yet the sounds of war seem to echo through every video that reaches my phone screen. There are nights when I go to sleep after hours of watching footage of children being bombed, of families looking for their loved ones, of homes turned into ash. There is a sense of helplessness and an uneasy guilt — the guilt of witnessing suffering from the safety of a room far away, the guilt of knowing that for many, this is not an image or a headline but their lived reality. And still, there is another thought: that I must not allow this to slip out of my mind. In a world where tragedy competes with timelines, trends, and the next breaking notification, forgetting can happen too quickly. News cycles move on. Audiences scroll. Outrage fades. But war does not end because attention does. That is why, even from afar, the responsibility feels urgent. There is only so much one can do when not reporting from the frontlines, but that cannot become an excuse for distance of conscience. The duty then is to do whatever is possible; to keep the story alive in the newsroom, to keep asking questions, to keep pushing for space in the news cycle, to make sure the suffering of those caught in conflict does not disappear beneath the speed of daily headlines. Sometimes reporting from a distance means piecing together truth through voices, testimonies, footage, satellite images, official statements, and fragments of grief carried across borders. It means holding on to empathy while working through facts. It means carrying the emotional burden of witnessing without the ability to intervene. I am grateful that at Outlook, we have continued to hold space for these stories, to recognise that even when a war is geographically far, its human cost demands our sustained attention. In moments like these, journalism is not only about information; it is about refusing erasure.

"To not let the world move on too quickly.

And to keep telling the story in whatever way we can."

It is what it is, but should it be? 

Ainnie Arif

When I read about the world wars in college, I imagined a world that had come to a halt, everyone drawn into the act of fighting, defending themselves and those they called allies. I pictured trenches where men took their last breaths, forgotten in the chaos, their names etched years later onto walls and memorials.

Now, as violence unfolds on my screen, that imagination feels almost naive. It is jarring—humiliating, even—to witness the brutality so closely: bodies broken, blood splashed across the faces of children. Sirens blare in countries miles away, and I receive updates in real time. And yet, I feel just as helpless. What are these wars for? The glory of men who sit far from the frontlines? Is it for oil, for power, for wealth they already have in abundance?

I cannot say. But what I do know is that this war is not foreign, and it should not be seen that way. There may be no hand-to-hand combat around us, but the battle is everywhere, in the propaganda that reaches all of us, from a daily-wage labourer in Noida to a finance broker in New York City. It touches us all, whether we realise it or not. And it is almost naive to convince ourselves otherwise.

In the newsroom, I find a strange calm amid the chaos, in colleagues who look past what those in power want us to believe, who see victims where others see threats. There is still sanctity in international law, even when global bodies do little more than “monitor the situation”. And then there are the headlines—calling a war an “escalation”, a careful choice of words that does little to soften the truth on the ground.

In reality, this war has spilled past borders—into algorithms, into markets—pulling the world to a point it can no longer look beyond. And as a journalist, I can say it has tested everything I have learned, what to trust, what to question, and how to keep telling the story without losing sight of the truth.

A World Needs Peace, Not A Barren Land 

Jagisha Arora

When I sit in an office and see visuals of bombings and attacks on women, children, and innocent civilians, I am reminded of my own privileges. Safety is often taken for granted, but it becomes visible when you see the contrast to lives shattered elsewhere.

But beyond the horror and chaos, there is also a quiet longing for a world where leaders choose dialogue over destruction, where handshakes replace hostility, and where peace is not a temporary pause but a lasting commitment.

What we need is not another barren landscape shaped by war, but a future where children can dream freely, untouched by fear, and grow up in a world where their biggest concern is what game to play next.

I dream of a world beyond borders and shared by all people. Humanity over hostility.

No one wins a war

Apeksha Priyadarshini

Watching a war unfold from a newsroom is a macabre experience. People become numbers; missiles become a reflection of muscle power rather than the death and destruction they bring; and policy decisions become the next news update, while their consequences on a living, breathing population get lost in the noise. We tend to forget that no one wins a war; it is only our collective humanity that loses each time. As charged and urgent as a moment may seem, what remains crucial is to never lose sight of questioning what you're receiving on your phone and television screens, where it is appearing from and why the escalation began in the first place. Most importantly, it is imperative to keep empathy alive, at a time when those in power seek to numb your capability to see and feel the very real suffering of your fellow human beings.

Reporting a War I Cannot See

Mohammad Ali

There are no checkpoints for me to cross, no cratered streets to walk through, no smell of burnt metal or cordite to confirm what I write. Instead, I sit before screens—maps, grainy videos, satellite images, statements issued in the language of certainty. The war reaches me through fragments of a plume of smoke looping endlessly, a timestamp that may or may not be accurate, a voice message sent before the network goes silent.

This is what war reporting has become at a distance—an exercise in assembling truth from absence.

So we improvise.

We triangulate. We call sources who speak in lowered voices. We cross-check a missile strike against satellite imagery, then against hospital records, then against the testimony of someone who may themselves be guessing. Social media is both a lifeline and a minefield—full of immediacy, but also manipulation. Verification becomes the story behind the story.  

To report from afar is to constantly doubt your own authority. You are aware that somewhere, someone else is closer to the truth—perhaps a local reporter, perhaps a civilian with a phone, perhaps no one at all. You are also aware that distance can flatten suffering. Casualties become numbers faster when you have not seen the faces.

There is a peculiar guilt in this: the safety that enables the story is also what distances you from it.

War correspondents were once defined by proximity—by being there, by witnessing firsthand, by writing with the authority of presence.  But contemporary war reporting is increasingly shaped by absence: by closed borders, digital mediation, and the sheer difficulty of verifying reality in real time.  

What, then, does it mean to bear witness?

Perhaps it means acknowledging the limits of what we know. It means resisting the urge to smooth over uncertainty with confident prose. It means naming the source, the doubt, the gap. It means writing sentences that do not pretend the fog has lifted when it hasn’t.

I am covering a war I cannot see.

None is immune to war

Ishfaq Naseem

None is immune to the impact of war. Reading about the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and its impact on the fuel supplies in Kashmir only showed how dependent the world is on each other. The global economy was in a tailspin, and the truce was cheered up by bourses across the world. And predictably, people erupted in joy over the ceasefire in Kashmir too. But on the day the US and Israel launched joint military strikes on Iran, leading to the retaliatory attacks from the country, thousands of people converged on the roads to express solidarity with the people of Iran. None really could have escaped from the war, and the truce came as a sigh of relief for people in Kashmir, too, some of whose loved ones are either working in Gulf countries or are studying in Iran.

Civilisations do not die on a deadline

Fozia Yasin

Tracking it from our homes as the clock ticked on Trump’s warning to erase a civilisation, each update carried the weight of something unimaginable. It could be nuclear, indiscriminate, anything. The world bit its nails. And then, just as the breath ran out, a ceasefire. The exhale was collective, but the dread did not fully leave.

The images that undid me completely were of the men, women, the elderly and children, forming human chains around power plants, offering themselves as shields. How do you bomb a people who are already walking towards you? How do you threaten annihilation to those who have already made peace with it? There is no weapon powerful enough to defeat a people who are not afraid to die, only afraid to live without dignity.

I recognised it immediately. It is the same thing I have seen on the streets of Kashmir. Mass protests, an entire community thinking as one, not because they believe they can win by force, but because surrender was never an option. That is what faith does. It does not promise safety. It promises that you will not break. Imam Hussain did not march to Karbala expecting to survive. He marched because some things are worth more than survival…

All this week, I had been sitting with Iranian families. Chatting in offices, drinking tea in homes, laughing in university corridors, and absorbing stories of fear held upright by resolve. I come from Iran-e-Sageer, Little Iran, and just like that, we were no longer strangers. Conversations that felt like old friendships. I know what this inheritance feels like: helpless in power, but undefeatable in spirit.

The distance between us collapsed completely.

Civilisations do not die on a deadline. Hey Trump, You're fired… Thank you for your attention to this matter!