If I turn my head to my right, on the wall of my office is a framed photograph: an original signed print by the photojournalist Judah Passow, with whom I have worked as a writer for the past nine years on journalistic assignments to Israel. The picture depicts the medical team at an Italian field hospital at the Sabra refugee camp, operating on an injured boy. The lighting and the composition reminds me of an Old Master, perhaps Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp.

When I read, as I sometimes do, the clamorous clashes of words in the comment boxes on this site about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war waged with URLs - quotations from this or that leader's diary, paragraphs from the Hamas charter - I always remember to turn and look at the picture; to remind myself of the sorrow and pity of war.

A child mutilated by modern warfare; without the caption, who knows his nationality? He might be a Palestinian kid, injured by the fall-out of an Israeli hit on a militant's house. He could be an Israeli boy who was eating pizza at a cafe in west Jerusalem moments before a suicide bomber detonated himself. Or he could be in an another part of the world altogether: Ramadi a couple of days ago when a car bomb killed 18 children; Baghdad four years ago when the US and its allies began its aerial bombardment.

This is war world, where the rules of civilisation as we understand it cease to apply. War world looks different from the one we know and understand. We need to study it. Here is a bridesmaid at a Palestinian wedding in the Sabra refugee camp in west Beirut.

And here is a child dementedly biting her nails amid the ruins of the centre of Jenin in the aftermath of the Israeli incursion in 2002.

A young Bosnian man plays the piano in the wreckage of a music conservatory shelled by Serbian artillery. An Israeli father mourns the death of his son, a soldier killed on the West Bank.

The spare strong composition of Judah's photographs, the absence of editorial comment, the haunting black and white, glamorise neither armies nor resistance. They speak of the human cost of war, its reality, without sentimentality. Explore his website, launched yesterday. These are essays in images. Think with your eyes, for a little while.