Refaat Al-Areer
رفعت العرعير
Head of English social media for the Palestinian Information Center, Editor for "We Are Not Numbers" and for "Gaza Martyrs"
Killed by Israel using an Airstrike
Killed by Israel on 6 Dec 2023
Links
- Biography
- A student's tribute to mentor Refaat Alareer, Gaza’s beloved storyteller
- Israel bombed my home without warning
- Israeli Strike on Refaat al-Areer Apparently Deliberate
- 'If I must die' in several languages
- Refaat Alareer Was My Friend. I Will Miss Him Forever
- My Search For Refaat Alareer’s Body
- Refaat's friend Asem Alnabih prepared a tombstone for Refaat and his siblings and nephews
- Refaat's body found and buried at Ibn Marwan Cemetery near Al-Shujaiya
- Prominent Gaza professor and writer killed in airstrike, weeks after telling CNN he and his family had ‘nowhere else to go’
Archivist Notes
Full Name: Refaat Rafiq Saeed Al-Areer "Abu Omar" | رفعت رفيق سعيد العرعير
Assassinated by a direct Israeli airstrike on his sister’s home in Al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza City, along with his brother Salah and the latter's son Mohammad, his sister Asmaa and her children Alaa, Mohammad, Yahya and Nada al-Aklouk. His sister-in-law Aalaa and two other children, Rafik and Alma, were injured.
His body was found after a long search early February 2025, and buried in a makeshift cemetery alongside his siblings and nephews at bn Marwan Cemetery near Al-Shujaiya, his native hometown.
Refaat was a prominent Palestinian academic, poet, activist, and educators. He was a renowned professor of English literature at the Islamic University of Gaza holding a PhD in English literature. Since 2007, he had trained students to use English to narrate the Palestinian experience and convey life under occupation to the world. He also founded and supervised the Social Media Department at the Palestinian Information Center.
According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, the Israeli airstrike was deliberate: only the second-floor apartment where Refaat was sheltering was bombed, not the rest of the building. This followed weeks of threats he received online and by phone from Israeli accounts. A person claiming to be an Israeli officer allegedly warned him they knew his location at an UNRWA school. He faced sustained hate campaigns, incitement from public figures.
Israel had previously bombed his apartment in Operation Protective Edge in 2014, killing over 30 relatives.
After the 2014 war, he co-founded the “We Are Not Numbers” project to document the lives of martyrs and connect Gaza writers with international mentors. Following October 2023, he intensified his dedication to documenting the reality of the war and genocide in Gaza. He helped establish the “Gaza Martyrs” page to preserve the stories, faces, and dreams of those killed, "Because they are not numbers, here we tell the story of the martyrs, their lives.". He shared writings and translations that broke through the siege,
Language was central to his mission: he translated writings into English to reach global audiences, preserved oral histories of elderly Palestinians, and taught that narrative was a form of resistance. He once said: «When we write about martyrs, we must mention that the occupation killed them. We must not leave the verb to the passive.»
He published 'Gaza Returns to Writing' (2014), 'Gaza Breaks Its Silence' (2015), and articles in international outlets, including a 2021 editorial for the New York Times.
On October 9, 2023, in an interview, he remarked: "I am an academic person and the hardest thing I have at home is a blackboard pen, and I will throw it at the Israeli soldiers if they try to break into my house, even if that is the last thing I do."
In November 2023, he republished his 2011 poem “If I Must Die,” which went viral worldwide after his death, translated and recited in dozens of languages.