Ocular aggression: From Bangladesh to Gaza, why regimes deliberately blind protesters

Before the darkness engulfed everything, Mahbubul Alam had two loves in his life: Photography and Frangipani flowers. A fateful afternoon in July 2024, at the Chashara roundabout in Narayanganj, meant he would never see either again. 

A procession had swelled into the intersection at around half past one. The police propped up barricades on all four sides to stop the traffic. Alam peered his head out of the mouth of a narrow alley for a second to see where the officers had taken position. 

In that instant, the pellets found his eyes.

The blood came, he would say afterwards, the way it comes out of a slaughtered animal, and he could not hold his head up. All he managed was an apology to his mother. 

Alam is one of hundreds of Bangladeshis who did not lose their lives in the July Uprising, but lost their sight. Their injuries were the intended outcome of a particular weapon, fired by a state for a very specific purpose. And that purpose was to blind rather than to kill. And it binds Dhaka to a grim international fraternity of repressive governments that have learnt to blind and maim their citizens without quite finishing them off. 

A weapon that maims by design

The tools deployed across Bangladesh were officially "less-than-lethal". Fired from 12-gauge pump-action shotguns, each cartridge scatters hundreds of lead pellets in a wide, inaccurate cloud. At close range, that cloud has no room to spread. It arrives as a single mass, and it does to an eye socket what a usual bullet does. 

Between mid-July and 15 August 2024, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights estimated that roughly 1,400 people were killed and more than 20,000 injured. 

At the National Institute of Ophthalmology and Hospital in Dhaka, doctors recorded more than 700 pellet-related eye injuries, over 500 of them requiring emergency surgery. Among them, 28 people were blind in both eyes, and 510 were blind in one.

Dr Khair Ahmed Chowdhury, Director of the National Institute of Ophthalmology and Hospital, had witnessed state violence against protesters before, having participated in the anti-Ershad movement as a student. He said the injuries treated during the 2024 protests differed significantly from those he had encountered during that period.

"In our student life, we also participated in the anti-Ershad movement. Back then, we knew the police would shoot at the legs. But this time, they shot in the eyes, in the head. Never before have we seen so many young people with gunshot wounds to the eyes and head at once. The experience was horrific. Our operating theatres were active 24 hours. 

"Our female doctors stayed in the hospital and continued treating patients. Surgeries were carried out in 10 theatres. We could never have imagined such a scenario. Most of the injured were 15 to 25 years old." 

Procurement records show the police bought more than three million metal-pellet cartridges in 2022 and 2023 — over twice their order of rubber bullets in the same window.

"The largest and most widespread wave of eye injuries — what the academic literature calls ocular aggression — occurred during the July Uprising," said Shoeb Abdullah, co-founder of the Bangladesh Protest Archive, an audio-visual initiative documenting rights violations in the country. "In Bangladesh, the greatest number of eye injuries resulted from pellet ammunition, which permanently damaged the eyesight of hundreds of people." 

The figures alone fail to show the true extent of the catastrophe. 

Muhammad Mainuddin, an office worker and father of three, was struck by more than three hundred pellets near Shanir Akhra on 5 August after officers with megaphones assured the crowd they only wished to talk. His companion was killed; Mainuddin was left with faint light perception in one eye and hundreds of lead fragments lodged near his nerves. "I am the sole breadwinner of my family," he said from his hospital bed, "How am I supposed to take care of them now?" 

On 25 May 2025, four young men who had lost their sight in the uprising tried to end their lives together — defeated less by their injuries than by the silence that followed them home. Such is the trauma of losing eyesight. 

The dead-eye epidemic of Kashmir

Bangladesh was not the first instance of such ocular aggression. In Indian-administered Kashmir, the pellet shotgun has been an instrument of governance since 2010. After the killing of the militant Burhan Wani in 2016, paramilitary forces admitted to firing 1.3 million pellets in 32 days. Within seven months, more than 6,000 people were wounded, 782 of them with severe eye trauma. 

Ophthalmologists in Srinagar had a name for what they were treating: the dead eye. Most of the blinded were young and of working age, their livelihoods extinguished alongside their sight. Among them was Hiba Jan, twenty months old, hit by pellets fired through the wire mesh of her own front door. 

No member of the security forces has been prosecuted.

In Gaza, the target was the future

Nowhere has the logic of maiming been more deliberate than in Palestine. During the Great March of Return, the weekly Gaza protests that began in March 2018, snipers did not merely fire into crowds; they aimed low, and they aimed at eyes. 

Over roughly two years, 214 Palestinians, including 46 children, were killed and more than 36,100 were injured; 156 of the limb injuries resulted in amputations. Gaza's health ministry recorded around 50 protesters permanently blinded by shots to the eye, most of them journalists and photographers struck directly. 

The photojournalist Muath Amarneh lost his left eye to a rubber-coated bullet while covering a West Bank protest; across Gaza, colleagues wore eye patches in solidarity, and in mourning.

The scholar Jasbir Puar gave this its name. In her book 'The Right to Maim', she argues that a state can exercise power not only by killing but by keeping people alive and broken, debilitated, dependent, unable to work or organise, a lasting burden on their own society. To maim is to punish the living and to warn those watching. 

It is Achille Mbembe's necropolitics turned down a notch: not the right to kill, but the right to make one suffer indefinitely. That the practice was foreseeable makes it worse. Israel's own Supreme Court recommended as early as 2000 that rubber-coated metal bullets were lethal and should not be used to police demonstrations. They were used anyway. 

The same doctrine, from Santiago to Bogota

The pattern recurs wherever crowds gather and states take fright. In Chile's 2019 revolt against inequality, police fired more than a hundred thousand pellet rounds; the national human rights institute documented over 440 eye injuries during those protests, more than 30 of them total losses of an eye, among them the psychology student Gustavo Gatica, blinded in both. 

In Colombia, the same year, 18-year-old Dilan Cruz was killed by a beanbag round fired from a 12-gauge shotgun by a Bogotá police officer. During the 2020 protests in the United States, at least 115 people were shot in the head with 'less-lethal' rounds, and dozens lost eyes. 

"Attacks targeting the eyes form part of a broader strategy of repression," Shoeb Abdullah says. "We have seen similar tactics used in Chile, Colombia, and during numerous labour and left-wing protest movements, where security forces deliberately targeted prominent activists with less-lethal weapons."

A trade no treaty yet touches

Here is the uncomfortable fact beneath the casualty lists. Despite the grave risks these weapons carry, there are at present no international regulations governing their manufacture or trade. Kinetic impact projectiles sit in a legal grey zone, which is seldom banned outright, seldom accountable. The UN issued its Human Rights Guidance on Less-Lethal Weapons in Law Enforcement in 2020, but guidance is not law. 

In 2023, Amnesty International and the Omega Research Foundation, among some 30 organisations, called for a UN-backed Torture-Free Trade Treaty to prohibit the production and transfer of inherently abusive projectiles. 

In April 2024, UN experts, including the Special Rapporteur on torture, endorsed the demand and pointed to the 2020 guidance and a new model protocol for law enforcement. Physicians for Human Rights and the International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations have chronicled the harm for a decade in their "Lethal in Disguise" reports. The treaty still does not exist. 

Shoeb Abdullah traces Bangladesh's own turn to this method to 2013, when the state grew more repressive and the practice, he says, became institutionalised and visible in the crackdowns of 2014 and 2018 before it reached its culmination in 2024. 

That is the quiet horror of the blinding weapon. It is cheaper than a massacre and easier to deny. It leaves no body for the front page, only citizens who must be fed, nursed and grieved over for decades.