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الفهرس

A room of the archive

The Voice

الصوت

Refaat Alareer

رفعت العرير

1979–2023

Gaza City, Gaza

Professor, editor, and poet of Gaza, Alareer taught a generation of young writers to write back — and left behind a poem asking to be remembered.

GazapoetryeducationGaza Writes Back2023

Refaat Alareer was born in 1979 in Gaza City’s Shuja’iyya neighborhood. A professor of English literature at the Islamic University of Gaza, he taught literature and creative writing and became a mentor to a generation of young Palestinian writers determined to tell their own stories in English. He edited Gaza Writes Back (2014), an anthology of short stories by young writers in Gaza, and co-edited Gaza Unsilenced (2015) with Laila El-Haddad.

Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike on 6 December 2023, in Shuja’iyya, along with members of his family. After his death, his poem “If I Must Die” — written in 2011 — was shared around the world and translated into dozens of languages, its closing plea repeated as a testament: “If I must die, / let it bring hope, / let it be a tale.”

Selected works

  • “If I Must Die” (2011)
  • Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza (editor, 2014)
  • Gaza Unsilenced (co-editor with Laila El-Haddad, 2015)

Sources

Read more

Explore selected poems, essays, and biographical material on the linked source.

Explore Refaat Alareer

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  1. If I Must DiePoem
  2. MomPoem
  3. Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud1913–1948

Connected in the archive

15 connected records

15 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.

the same person, held in two collections — 1 record

born in — 1 record

written by them — 2 records

  • If I Must DiePoems

    Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: poetSlug: "refaat-alareer" → Refaat Alareer

  • MomPoems

    Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: poetSlug: "refaat-alareer" → Refaat Alareer

names this person — 3 records

One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.

  • The Poets of ExileExhibitions

    Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Gaza's professor of literature, killed in December 2023.

  • Omar AbedelalTestimonies

    Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: He gave this account, at the age of 82, to the late Gaza academic and writer Refaat Alareer, who recorded the memories of Nakba survivors for a 2021 feature first published by Politics Today and republished by the Palestinian Information Center.

  • Reem Kelaniريم كيلانيFiguresSinger, music researcher, and broadcaster · 1963–

    Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: …BBC broadcaster — she wrote and presented the Radio 4 series Distant Chords (2001–2003) and Songs for Tahrir (2012) — in 2024 she released her setting of Refaat Alareer's poem "If I Must Die" as a benefit single for UNRWA.…

on a related subject — 8 records

Filed near each other — the same Mandate district, or the same uncommon subject tags.

Cite this page

Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.

Chicago
“Refaat Alareer.” Poetry, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/poetry/refaat-alareer.
MLA
“Refaat Alareer.” Poetry, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/poetry/refaat-alareer. Accessed 22 August 2026.
BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-refaat-alareer, title = {Refaat Alareer}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/poetry/refaat-alareer}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }