New Year, old wishes -- war-weary Mideast children look forward to yesterday

BEIRUT, Jan. 2 (Xinhua) -- As children across the world greet the New Year with fireworks and resolutions, for those growing up along the Middle East's most volatile fault lines, time is measured differently. The New Year is no longer marked by progress or promise, but by the distance between what has been lost and what barely remains.

From the tent cities of Gaza to the besieged corridors of Sudan and the drone-shadowed hills of southern Lebanon, a generation is being shaped not by ambition, but by endurance.

For 11-year-old Mohammad Hamad, home is a white nylon tent pitched in the sand of Al-Mawasi, southern Gaza. It is a fragile, provisional refuge for a family of seven who have been displaced eight times since the war began. Their flight from Beit Hanoun in the north has become a map of loss: a demolished home, a father's lost limb, and a childhood now defined by the heavy drudgery of hauling water and waiting for meager rations.

Before the war, Hamad was a student whose world was painted with the vibrant colors of his pencils and a love of learning. He took pride in his neat notebooks and the orderly rows of his classroom. But the conflict took them away. Now, the classrooms that once sheltered his dreams are either crammed with displaced families or reduced to heaps of rubble.

The destruction is not just physical. The fear, Hamad said, never really leaves. It lingers in the night, in his dreams, and in sudden sounds that summon the roar of shelling.

Living in deprivation has stripped hope to its bare minimum. So Hamad's New Year wish is modest. He asks for nothing more than the return of the ordinary. "I hope we never relive what we experienced," he said. For him, peace is not abstract or political; it is the sound of birds in the morning and a clear, safe path to school.

Thousands of miles to the south, in the heart of fractured Sudan, 13-year-old Awab Mohamed Abdel-Rahim is haunted by a different absence.

"My father died because the medicine was not available," Abdel-Rahim said with a stillness unsettling in one so young. The simple sentence echoes the tragedy of thousands of families trapped in Sudan's besieged cities, cut off from food, medicine, and any way out.

Abdel-Rahim now lives with his mother and brothers in a displacement camp in central Sudan's El Obeid, after fleeing the southwestern city of Babanusa. During those desperate days, Abdel-Rahim remembers watching his father weaken as he searched in vain for medicine. "The hospital was empty," he said. "Every day he got worse, and there was nothing we could do."

This trauma has forged in him a resolve well beyond his years. He dreams of becoming a doctor, imagining a future where medical care is a fundamental right, not a casualty of conflict. His New Year wish, born of sorrow: "I hope no child loses their father because of war."

In southern Lebanon, the New Year was heralded not by the crackle of fireworks, but by the relentless, electric hum of surveillance drones.

In classrooms across border villages, students struggle to focus on their textbooks, their concentration shattered by the world outside.

Lina Nasr, a student at Al-Firdis School, said she often closes her eyes during lessons, silently praying for the sky to remain quiet -- a wish she counts among her most important hopes for the New Year.

In the playground of the Kfarchouba school, students' rare moments of laughter are repeatedly punctured by the distant thud of shelling. Hassan Yahya, a 14-year-old student at the school, said he no longer dreams of toys or new clothes, but of a year when the walk to school is not a journey through fear.

"My only New Year wish is for this war to stop, and for all the places I used to go to become safe again," Yahya said.

His mother, Sarah, 40, said the family has grown accustomed to sleeping in their clothes during periods of escalation, ready for emergencies. "Our children can no longer distinguish between the sound of artillery shelling and thunder, and they are in constant tension," she said.

According to a joint report by the United Nations Children's Fund and the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health, children across the country are enduring profound psychological and physical scars. Constant exposure to violence and displacement has manifested in chronic anxiety, sleep disorders, and severe difficulties with concentration.

As 2026 begins, many people look ahead to the future. But for Hamad, Abdel-Rahim, and Yahya, hope is retrospective. Their New Year wishes are not for tomorrow's possibilities, but for yesterday's certainties -- the ring of a school bell, the presence of a father, and a few quiet hours under the sky.

Their wishes are not unimaginative; they are devastating. That is the cost of protracted conflict -- a cost the region can no longer bear.■