CAIRO, Dec. 31 (Xinhua) -- Across the Middle East, the upheaval of the past year has been measured not only in bombs and gunfire, but in quieter calculations: how far people can run, how much they can carry, and how long they can endure.
Throughout 2025, tens of thousands across the region were forced to abandon their homes, schools, and livelihoods, and tens of thousands more lived in tents or among rubble, their homes destroyed or beyond reach.
For them, the turmoil is more than news headlines. It is pain, fear, and suffering that shape every day of their lives. As the world ushers in a new year, their wishes are simple: back to something like the life they once called normal.
FLIGHT FROM FIRE
The night Majed Al-Dahdouh, a 37-year-old doctor, and his family fled the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood in Gaza City, the sky flashed and the air tasted of dust.
Israeli forces had ordered an immediate evacuation, but before many residents could find the exits, the bombardment had begun. Al-Dahdouh grabbed what he could as the ground buckled from airstrikes just blocks away. "It was a night of hell," he recalled.
Days later, he had to flee again. He navigated a landscape of smoke and pulverized concrete, the air sharp with the scent of explosives and the staccato of gunfire. Each step felt like a gamble against impossible odds, he said. "I did not expect to live to see the next day."
Similar moments repeated themselves across the region throughout the year -- different cities, different accents, the same tightening in the chest.
In Tehran, Mahmood, an Iranian man who asked that his full name not be used, joined the crowds fleeing the capital after Israeli airstrikes began in June. Traffic collapsed into a static sea of metal, families trapped in a paralysis of fear. "The whole city came to a halt," Mahmood said. "Everyone was frightened."
As his family inched forward, a strike hit nearby. Smoke rolled across the highway. Their windshield cracked outward, the glass spreading like a spiderweb. "We thought that was the end," he said. "We survived. But those memories stay with you."
In Yemen, the odyssey began in April for Khaled Suleiman, a 48-year-old teacher. When American airstrikes struck the Houthi-controlled port city of Hodeidah, the shockwaves shattered more than his windows; they broke the life he had spent decades building. "The house shook as if it were taking its last breath," Suleiman said.
He fled to Aden, expecting just days of displacement. Yet months later, he was still in limbo, with his "temporary" shelter edging toward permanence.
LIFE AMONG RUBBLE
If the flight from gunfire is a brief, violent dash, what follows is a slower ordeal: living in what remains.
In the Gaza Strip, winter storms have flooded camps and shredded tents, worsening an already dire situation. Ali Al-Hajjar, 55, stood in the shell of his home in Gaza City's al-Jalaa neighborhood, swinging a sledgehammer into collapsed concrete to pull out rebar. Not for rebuilding the house, but for reinforcing his family's tent against wind and rain.
"I am no longer searching the rubble for personal belongings," Al-Hajjar said, his hands gray with the dust of pulverized masonry. "I am searching for materials to protect my family from the winter."
Hundreds of miles to the north, in the Lebanese village of Adaisseh along the "Blue Line" separating Lebanon and Israel, 70-year-old Hassan Abu Khalil inspected a different kind of ruin. A large crater was left in his yard, like a dark, unblinking eye. Beside it lay a broken plastic chair and a handful of charred toys.
Above him, the sky was never truly silent. The low, persistent hum of drones served as a mechanical reminder: the war might be paused, but it was not gone.
"My grandchildren always ask, 'Will the planes return?'" Abu Khalil said, noting that seven decades of life had not prepared him with an answer.
In Sudan, the toll manifests itself in the psyche of the young. Inside a makeshift classroom at a displacement camp in El Obeid, a teacher, Ahmed Abdelaziz, stood before a patchwork of salvaged desks. When the distant thud of an explosion rolled through the camp one afternoon, the children did not merely startle. They froze.
"Education here," Abdelaziz said, "is psychological treatment before it is academic instruction."
YEARNING FOR RETURN
Across these landscapes, one word recurs: return. For many, the goal is not merely a geographical location, but a return to a rhythm of life that once felt ordinary.
Ali Abu Harbid, a volunteer medic with the Palestine Red Crescent Society, has spent months tending to the wounded while his own life remains suspended. "What I want most right now is to return to my normal life," he said. "To live with my family. To eat well. To live in peace."
The obstacle is both geographical and political. His home in Beit Hanoun lies beyond the "yellow line" drawn by the Israeli army as a withdrawal boundary during the first phase of the ceasefire. He cannot return. He cannot rebuild.
In Sudan, Abdelaziz said he hopes his students can return to a proper classroom in 2026, with safe roads leading to them. "No more drones. No more explosions," he said, with his fingers crossed.
In the central Hama countryside of Syria, Akram Mahmoud al-Shehada, 66, sat on a plastic chair amid the ruins of his home. After 14 years of displacement in Jordan, he returned to his village of Qabr Fiddah earlier this year.
He did not return because conditions had improved, he said, but because the wait had become unbearable. He now lives in a tent pitched among the rubble of his former life. As the new year approaches, al-Shehada said he will not leave again.
"I am content," he said, "because I am home."
