My new year’s resolution is to hug my parents before they die

Ahmed Najar lives in London, just a four-hour plane journey away from his mum and dad in Gaza – but says he might as well be on another planet

Whenever the world counts down to a new year, people speak of resolutions with a lightness that feels almost obscene to me. Lose weight. Travel more. Read more books. Be kinder to yourself.

My new year’s resolution is simpler – and apparently far more radical.

I want to hug my parents before they die.

That is it. That is my wish. Not wealth. Not success. Not recognition. Just the physical certainty that my arms have wrapped around the people who gave me life – once more – before time, bombs, borders, or indifference decide otherwise.

I was born and raised in Gaza and have lived in London for the past two decades. My parents, siblings, and nephews and nieces still live in Gaza.

My parents live less than four hours away by plane. Four hours. A distance so ordinary it barely registers in most people’s lives. A weekend trip. A delayed flight. An inconvenience at worst.

And yet, for me, it might as well be another planet.

They have never met my son. Not once. Not in person. Not properly on a screen either. Even video calls betray us – frozen faces, broken voices, a connection that collapses just as he smiles. My parents strain to hear him. He stares at a pixelated version of love he cannot understand. And then the screen goes black.

This is what inheritance looks like now: a child inheriting separation before memory.

When your new year’s wish is to introduce your baby to his grandparents – and you cannot – you begin to understand how profoundly broken this world is. This separation is not accidental. It is not fate. It is not a tragic misunderstanding of bureaucracy.

It is the direct result of Israel’s siege, occupation, and control over Palestinian life – over our borders, our airspace, our movement, and even our ability to exist as families. It is Israel that decides who moves and who waits, who leaves and who is trapped, who gets to grow old surrounded by loved ones and who grows old alone.

My parents are in Gaza. A place that Israel has turned into a cage. A place where ageing is accelerated by fear, where time is measured not in years but in wars, where survival itself has become an act of defiance. My parents live under siege, under bombardment, under a constant threat that the next explosion could be the last sound they ever hear.

And I live with the unbearable knowledge that while I watch my son take his first steps, my parents are counting how many buildings still stand around them.

They have never held him. Never kissed his cheeks. Never felt the weight of him in their arms. They know him through stories, through fragments, through love filtered by power cuts and poor connections – when the internet works, when electricity exists, when Israel allows it.

My parents are getting older. Their voices carry fatigue now. Every call feels heavier, as if we are both pretending not to hear the ticking clock between us. When we say goodbye, we do not say see you soon. We say inshallah – a word that now carries more fear than faith.

And my son grows. He learns new sounds, new gestures, new laughter. He is forming memories even if he does not yet know it. And somewhere deep inside me is the terror that his grandparents will remain abstractions to him – stories, photographs, ghosts.

This is not collateral damage. This is not an unfortunate byproduct of war. This is policy made intimate.

Israel’s system of control is often discussed in abstract terms – security, deterrence, geopolitics. But its true violence is measured in missed first steps, unanswered video calls, funerals attended through screens, and parents who die without being held by their children.

So when politicians speak of a “rules-based international order”, I want to ask: Whose rules allow this? Whose order normalises the destruction of Palestinian families?

Because any system that treats Palestinian love as expendable is not an order worth preserving. It is one that urgently needs dismantling and reshaping.

I live in London. I work. I pay taxes. I contribute. I speak, write, explain, justify, contextualise my own grief endlessly so that others might find it comfortable. And yet I remain trapped in a world that demands Palestinians be patient, polite, and silent – even as it excuses the machinery that crushes our lives.

My new year’s resolution is not self-improvement. It is survival. It is resistance in its most human form. I want to hug my parents. I want my parents to hold my son. I want a world where this is not considered unreasonable, dangerous, or political.

If that makes me radical, then perhaps the problem is not my wish – but the world that criminalises it. As fireworks light up the sky and people toast to fresh beginnings, I made my quiet, defiant resolution. Not whispered. Not ashamed.

I will keep demanding a world where love does not require permission. Where family is not held hostage by occupation. Where a four-hour flight does not become a lifetime of absence.

Anything less is not a new year. It is the same cruelty – uninterrupted.