Palestinians mourn poet Refaat Alareer reportedly killed during Gaza airstrike

Palestinians on Friday paid tribute to Refaat Alareer, a prominent poet and scholar who sought to tell the stories behind the headlines in the blockaded enclave of Gaza.

He was killed in an Israeli airstrike, his friends said.

The 44-year-old, who wrote in English, taught world literature and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza and edited two short story collections, Gaza Unsilenced and Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine.

"My heart is broken, my friend and colleague Refaat Alareer was killed with his family," Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian poet and librarian from Gaza wrote on Facebook in a tribute that was among many from Palestinian intellectuals. "I don't want to believe this."

Friends and colleagues said Alareer died on Thursday along with his brother, sister and her four children in a strike on their house in Gaza City where they had stayed despite Israeli military demands that the population evacuate south.

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Alareer, who fiercely denounced Israel and its policies toward the Palestinians, helped found We Are Not Numbers — an organization that connected young Palestinian writers with mentors to tell stories that go beyond the numbers in the news.

Dozens of relatives lost in Gaza assaults

Israel's bombardment has killed more than 17,000 Palestinians, according to authorities in Hamas-run Gaza, and internally displaced most of the enclave's population since the start of the war. The renewed conflict began when Hamas gunmen breached the separation barrier into southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 and seizing more than 240 people as hostages.

In a BBC interview hours after the Hamas attack, Alareer said Palestinian resistance was "legitimate and moral" and compared the attack to the wartime Jewish resistance to Nazi Germany.

"This is exactly like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This is the Gaza Ghetto Uprising against 100 years of European and Zionist colonialism and occupation," he said in the interview, which caused offence outside Gaza.

A father of six, Alareer had said he and his wife had lost more than 30 relatives in different Israeli assaults on Gaza.

The Islamic University in Gaza where he taught was hit during Israeli airstrikes on Oct. 11. 

One of his last posts on the social platform X, formerly known as Twitter, was a poem about what Alareer hopes will remain after his death.