Refaat Alareer

Refaat Alareer, born in 1979 in Gaza City’s Shuja’iyya neighborhood, was a professor of English literature and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza, where his courses put Shakespeare and John Donne — the subject of his doctorate — alongside Edward Said and Palestinian poets. Convinced that Palestinians “have to have our own narrative,” he wrote in English to reach the wider world, edited the anthology “Gaza Writes Back,” co-edited “Gaza Unsilenced,” and co-founded We Are Not Numbers, which paired young writers in Gaza with mentors abroad. “Palestine is a story away,” he wrote.

Alareer refused to leave northern Gaza when Israel’s ground offensive began, and was displaced with his family multiple times during the war’s first weeks, documenting what he called “unprecedented horror” as hunger hollowed his children’s faces. According to The Guardian, the day before his death he received a threatening phone call from the Israeli military, prompting him to relocate from a humanitarian shelter to his sister’s home — where, on December 6, 2023, an Israeli airstrike killed him along with his brother, his sister and four of her children. His friend, the poet Mosab Abu Toha, announced his death the following day.

Weeks earlier, Alareer had pinned to his profile a poem written in 2011 for his daughter Shymaa: “If I must die, you must live to tell my story … let it bring hope, let it be a tale.” After his killing it was translated into dozens of languages, read aloud by the actor Brian Cox and carried on banners at demonstrations around the world. Shymaa and her infant son were killed in an airstrike a few months after her father. A posthumous collection of his writing, “If I Must Die,” was published by OR Books a year after his death.

Sources

• ‘How many dead Palestinians are enough?’ The unbearable prescience of the late poet Refaat Alareer — The Guardian
• Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer killed in Gaza strike — Dawn (AFP)