Rash: Bombing of civilians seen in ‘Blitz’ isn’t old history — it’s happening in today’s wars, too

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“Blitz” tells the tale of George, a 9-year-old boy evacuated to the British countryside to escape Hitler’s blitzkrieg bombardment. But yearning for his mom, George jumps off the train and journeys back in a harrowing, at times horrifying, trip back home — or what’s left of London.

Still screening in theaters and streaming starting next week on Apple TV+, “Blitz” gives an unflinching look at the toll total warfare inflicts on children.

Tragically, total warfare isn’t just the stuff of history books or dramatic movies. It’s a returning reality.

“We are seeing the character of warfare to include the whole of society,” said Mara Karlin, the interim director of the Foreign Policy Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Karlin’s article, “The Return of Total War,” is the lead piece in Foreign Affairs’ November/December issue on today’s “World of War.”

The magazine’s cover is a rendering of red skies with white clouds that morph into bombers. Not those of the Nazi’s Luftwaffe, but more modern fighter jets like the kind conducting modern-day blitzes in the Mideast, eastern Ukraine and elsewhere.

The result is more Georges. Many more, according to UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, which reports that worldwide by the end of last year “some 400 million children — about one of every five — are living in or fleeing from conflict zones.”

Many are imperiled in nations not in the headlines, such as Haiti and several sub-Saharan African countries. Others are in the global glare in part because of the searing images of civilian casualties. UNICEF is in nearly all of them, 190 countries and territories, despite — indeed, because of — the dangers to children.

Including Lebanon, whose capital, Beirut, once considered the Paris of the Mideast, is paralyzed by bombardment from Israeli forces fighting the terrorist group Hezbollah, whose indiscriminate rocket launches into Israel have killed scores and emptied a portion of its northern border.

Among the unsung UNICEF heroes is James Elder, who took a brief break from Beirut’s constant carnage to talk about what he’s experienced in Lebanon, Gaza, Ukraine and elsewhere.

“I was at two different hospitals,” Elder said on Tuesday, “one where I saw a little boy [Ali] who had been under rubble for 14 hours before he was pulled out, and that was only two weeks ago. As he started talking again his counselor explained to him that the same blast had killed his mum and his dad and his siblings and his grandparents.”

The tragedy of Ali’s family is unique to him but ubiquitous in the war-torn region, Elder said. “When I first heard a story like that in Gaza a year ago — a child who’s lost every single family member — it was just hard to compute. I never imagined I would ever hear that; certainly never hear it again. I’ve now heard it so many times, double-digit times, that it’s not unique. It’s obviously utterly, overwhelmingly heartbreaking, but it’s no longer unique.”

That grave observation is reflected in data from the U.N. Human Rights Office, which last week reported that between November 2023 and April 2024, nearly 70% of war-related deaths in Gaza were women and children.

The U.N. agency, using three independent sources for fatality verification, added that the three categories most represented are children ages 5 to 9 (George’s age in “Blitz”), children ages 10-14, followed by babies and children up to 4 years old.

The particular perils facing 5- to 9-year-old kids “speaks to the indiscriminate nature, the intensity of the bombardment,” said Elder. “But with kids that age it’s that hellish moment of an inferno coming at you, knowing that there’s missile attacks. If you’re under 5, quite likely you’ll be carried. If you’re over 9 or 10, quite likely you’re able to run. From 5 to 9 you have that peak of vulnerability.”

The vulnerability for all kids is profound, physically and psychologically.

“I’ve worked a lot of time in Africa and not always in the Middle East and Ukraine,” Elder said. “We’ve got to always be careful [in comparing] crises. But when I look at places like Gaza now, I see the intensity of hundreds of thousands of children displaced in such a small amount of time. Here you see the suffering stretch the limits of what we thought was possible. Gaza, particularly, is utterly, utterly rock-bottom.”

What’s sanitized for big-screen cinema like “Blitz” and for small-screen newscasts is witnessed without filters by Elder and other humanitarian workers. What they see are “children lying on the floor who so clearly need attention, limbs that have been amputated or that will be amputated, seeing hundreds of children who absolutely will die,” often from shrapnel “designed to rip through concrete; you can imagine what it does to a child’s body. The burns — I’ll never forget the smell of children’s burning flesh.”

The psychological toll of children under today’s blitzes is extraordinary and likely enduring, Elder said. Including in eastern Ukraine, where some kids “have literally spent thousands of hours, the equivalent of four or five or six months, underground, simply because of the perpetual threat of air raids. And so the psychological impact on them, it’s uncharted territory.”

So too is the psychological impact on Hamas’ hostages, held in Gaza for over a year. Elder expressed equal anguish for them and their families. “When I’m in Gaza seeing images in the Israeli press, I look at those hostages who are said to still be somewhere, trying to imagine that horrendous torment that their families must feel.”

Many of the hostages are presumed to be held underground in tunnels or other areas Hamas hides, often among the civilians taking the brunt of the war the terrorist group started by slaughtering more than 1,200 Israelis and taking about 250 hostage on Oct. 7, 2023. In fact, the U.N. report states that about 80% of Gazan civilians killed were in residential buildings, reflecting Hamas’ heinous use of human shields.

In a press release accompanying its report, the U.N. Human Rights Office states that Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups “committed serious violations of international law on a wide scale” that “could amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

It’s also a scalding account of Israel’s war conduct, with warnings of impending international accountability. It concludes by quoting Volker Türk, the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“The trends and patterns of violations, and of applicable international law as clarified by the International Court of Justice, must inform the steps to be taken to end the current crisis,” Türk said. “The violence must stop immediately, the hostages and those arbitrarily detained must be released, and we must focus on flooding Gaza with humanitarian aid.”

It’s “a worrying time,” Elder said, “when it seems that society right now accepts that idea that wars will occur like this, knowing — it’s not a cliché line — the most vulnerable are children.”

We “know that with all these conflicts there will be a political solution — it won’t come militarily. But the longer that goes on, the more people will suffer here.”

In their Oval Office meeting on Wednesday, President Joe Biden asked President-elect Donald Trump to work together on a hostage/cease-fire deal to be completed by Inauguration Day, Jan. 20.

That’s encouraging. But scores more lives will be lost or ruined by then. So how about moving it up two months to Nov. 20?

That would seem fitting, since it’s the date the U.N. annually recognizes as World Children’s Day.