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They keep coming, both the bombs and the images from Aleppo, so many of them, the munitions raining indiscriminately on trapped families, aid workers and children . The Russian and Syrian government forces wouldn’t let them leave.

But the photographs and videos have made it out. The faces of the besieged, staring into the camera, at us, and at death, pleading for help, baffled by our indifference to the slaughter, describing the atrocities outside their bedrooms or just on the other side of the door. We see their faces from an angle we ordinarily see a friend’s face, up close, staring straight into our eyes.

We have never before received such a deluge of images from any front, never gotten such an intimate, minute-by-minute, look at what the United Nations high commissioner for human rights said on Wednesday most likely constituted war crimes.

“Please, save us, thank you,” says Bana al-Abed, a 7-year-old Syrian girl, in one video posted to Twitter. Bana has been tweeting for a few months with her mother from eastern Aleppo, where Syrian government and Russian forces bombed her family out of their home. This week she said she knew she was going to die. It is hard for me to imagine anyone watching the video without feeling intense horror and shame.

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Bana’s feed has prompted Western news outlets to fiddle over whether her tweets and videos are propaganda, whether Bana or her location can be authenticated.

And Aleppo continues to burn.

“When a free-trade agreement with the U.S.A. drives hundreds of thousands of people to the streets, but such horrible bombings as in Aleppo do not trigger any protest, then something is not right,” said Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel.

No, not right. Pictures of war and suffering have pricked the public conscience and provoked action before. There was Kevin Carter’s photograph from 1993 of a starving toddler and a vulture in Sudan. There was the photograph of the dead American soldier dragged through Mogadishu, which hastened the United States’ retreat from Somalia. There was Nick Ut’s 1972 photograph from South Vietnam of the naked 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc, screaming, burned by napalm. These pictures drove news cycles for weeks, months, years, helping tip the scales of policy.

A starving Sudanese girl in 1993, above, and Phan Thi Kim Phuc after an accidental South Vietnamese napalm strike near Trang Bang in 1972. Top, Kevin Carter/Sygma via Getty Images; bottom, Nick Ut/Associated Press

To be sure, the policy response was usually withdrawal. What might be done in a situation like Aleppo is not so linear. But that isn’t the whole story.

Does it matter that victims in Syria are Muslims? America’s president-elect won the election while playing to anti-Muslim bigotry. He sold himself to the American public as a transactional leader, promising deals, not necessarily decency. He said he admired Russia’s strongman president, Vladimir V. Putin, and campaigned on an isolationist retreat from global involvement.

We each turn to the news we like. During the Vietnam War, Americans watched the same network broadcasts and thumbed through the same magazine photographs. There was a draft. The war was in everyone’s home. Today a tiny percentage of Americans fight our battles. We watch desperate young strangers from faraway Aleppo from the comfort of a Facebook feed. The images and voices start to blur together. A tweet by President-elect Donald J. Trump or some scandal over fake news distracts us.

Briefly, we have mourned on a significant scale two photographs, the ones of Alan Kurdi, the dead 2-year-old washed up on the beach in Turkey, and of Omran Daqneesh, 5, pulled from the ashes of Aleppo, sitting in the ambulance, wiping blood from his face. We also paused over drone footage from a neighborhood in Aleppo pulverized by the Syrian government and Russia. Then those images dropped down the collective memory hole, too.

The body of Alan Kurdi last year in Bodrum, Turkey, above; and 5-year-old Omran Daqneesh in Aleppo in August. Top, Nilufer Demir/Dogan News Agency, Via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; bottom, Mahmoud Raslan/Aleppo Media Center

That’s because all images are Rorschach tests. Many thousands of people have been killed in Aleppo, millions displaced across Syria. Syrian, Iranian and Russian forces have laid waste to half the country, instigating a refugee crisis that threatens to unmake Europe and America.

But Washington shrugs. There have been no sanctions as there were over Russia’s annexation of Crimea. There turned out to be no red lines, even after chemical weapons killed and maimed hundreds, no marches on the Mall or big campus rallies. Russia and Syria bomb civilians with impunity.

And all we do is watch, helplessly, as Syrians refuse to go quietly, determined to get us to know them, their lives, all that has been lost.

Some of the public’s indifference can of course be chalked up to compassion fatigue and disillusionment with a war in its sixth year. Promises to end the conflict were broken over and over. There were assurances about popular uprisings. Social media today supercharges protest movements, which burn out almost as fast. Such movements used to require a slow, brick-by-brick construction. They didn’t rely on Facebook videos and Instagram photos.

Truth be told, no sane person wants to see these images anyway. What’s happening in Aleppo is almost unbearable to look at.

But that’s the point. Bana looks us straight in the eye and asks us to save her, please.

We have done nothing to help.

The very least we should do is look back.