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Palestinian poet Dr. Refaat Alareer killed in Israeli strike in Gaza

News Desk

Dec 08

Palestinian poet, writer, literature professor, and activist Dr. Refaat Alareer was killed in an Israeli airstrike, announced on Thursday evening.

“My heart is broken, my friend and colleague Refaat Alareer was killed with his family a few minutes ago,” wrote his friend, the Gazan poet, Mosab Abu Toha.

The Israeli airstrike also killed his brother, his sister, and four of her children. He is now survived by his wife, Nusayba, and their children.

Dr. Alareer was one of the leading contemporary authors in Gaza who settled on writing in English to tell stories of the besieged strip. He was one of the most prominent voices conveying details of the atrocities Israel is committing to global audiences.

He had been working as a professor of literature and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza since 2007.

His other contributions included co-editing Gaza Unsilenced (2015) and being editor of Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine (2014).

Dan Sheehan quotes in LitHub that in his contribution to the 2022 collection Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, titled “Gaza Asks: When Shall this Pass?”, Refaat writes:

“It shall pass, I keep hoping. It shall pass, I keep saying. Sometimes I mean it. Sometimes I don’t. And as Gaza keeps gasping for life, we struggle for it to pass, we have no choice but to fight back and to tell her stories. For Palestine.”

He was also one of the founders of We Are Not Numbers, a nonprofit organisation founded in Gaza following the 2014 Israeli attack and devoted himself to establishing “a new generation of Palestinian writers and thinkers who can bring together a profound change to the Palestinian cause.”

In November, Alareer published a poem on X entitled “If I must die” that was shared tens of thousands of times. It concludes with the words: “If I must die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale.”

Via his X (formerly Twitter) account, “Refaat in Gaza“, Dr. Alareer also openly condemned Israeli atrocities being committed in Gaza and was also vocal against the US who has been supporting Israel in its operations.

Remembering Refaat

The announcement of Dr. Refaat Alareer’s death evoked a cascade of sorrow and anguish across social media, shared by his friends, colleagues, former students, and followers:

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