Refaat Alareer

Refaat Alareer was a prominent Palestinian writer, poet, professor, and activist from the Gaza Strip.

He was born in Gaza City during the ‘Israeli’ occupation of the Gaza Strip, which he stated had negatively influenced every move and decision he made. Alareer earned a BA in English in 2001 from the Islamic University of Gaza and an MA from University College London in 2007. He earned a Ph.D. in English Literature at the Universiti Putra Malaysia in 2017 with a dissertation on John Donne.

Until his martyrdom he was teaching literature and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza and co-founded the organization We Are Not Numbers, which matched experienced authors with young writers in Gaza, and promoted the power of storytelling as a means of resistance.

On 6 December 2023, Alareer was killed in an ‘Israeli’ airstrike, along with his brother, sister and her three children, during the 2023 ‘Israeli’ invasion of the Gaza Strip. The Euro-Med Monitor released a statement saying that Alareer was deliberately targeted, “surgically bombed out of the entire building”, and came after weeks of “death threats that Refaat received online and by phone from Israeli accounts.”

(Text mostly copied straight from “Refaat Alareer” article in English Wikipedia by Wikipedia contributors.)