Refaat Alareer: Palestinians mourn writer killed in air strike

Palestinians are mourning the death of well-known writer and literary scholar Refaat Alareer, who was killed in an air strike in Gaza City on Wednesday.

Alareer's father-in-law said he had died along with his brother and sister and four of her children.

He taught English literature at Gaza's Islamic University.

"My heart is broken, my friend and colleague Refaat Alareer was killed with his family," Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha wrote on social media.

Alareer had declined to leave northern Gaza following the start of Israeli operations in the area. Two days before he died he posted video to social media in which a number of explosions could be heard.

"The building is shaking. The debris and shrapnel are hitting the walls and flying in the streets," he wrote.

In an interview with the BBC in the hours after Hamas's 7 October attack on Israel, Alareer caused widespread offence by calling it "legitimate and moral". He said it was "exactly like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising".

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was a revolt that took place in German-occupied Poland in 1943 and saw Jews use weapons smuggled into the ghetto to try to resist Nazi efforts to transport people to the extermination camps.

Alareer was one of the founders of "We Are Not Numbers", a Palestinian non-profit set up in 2015 that joined writers from around the world with young people in Gaza to "tell the stories behind the numbers of Palestinians in the news".

He was the co-editor of the book, Gaza Unsilenced, and the editor of Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine.

Paying tribute on social media, former student Jehad Abusalim described Alareer as a mentor and friend who had "truly cared about his students beyond the classroom".

Alareer, he added, taught him English and viewed the language as a "way to break free from Gaza's prolonged siege, a teleportation device that defied Israel's fences and the intellectual, academic, and cultural blockade of Gaza".

He was "full of energy, life & humour. He loved Chicago Pizza, cats, history, classic music, theatre, poetry & Harry Potter," said Muhammad Shehada, a Gazan writer and communications chief at Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.

He was described as "one of the kindest, most generous, committed, wonderful human beings I ever met", by Palestinian-American author and activist Susan Abulhawa in a video posted on social media.

"Rest in peace, Refaat Alareer. We will continue to be guided by your wisdom, now and forever," Palestinian-American author and journalist Ramzy Baroud wrote.

In a poem posted on X, formerly Twitter, on 1 November, Alareer wrote: "If I must die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale". The post has been shared tens of thousands of times.

Israel destroyed the Islamic University at which Alareer taught on 11 October, saying it was an "important Hamas operational, political and military centre in Gaza".

Following the outcry over Alareer's interview in October, a BBC spokesperson said: "We reported the Hamas attacks and the response by Israel in line with the BBC's Editorial Guidelines.

"We have included contributors who have condemned the attackers as terrorists and we have reported that Hamas is designated as a terrorist group by many Western governments, including the UK.

"While an interviewee who made comments on the Warsaw Ghetto was robustly challenged on air, we agree his comments were offensive and we don't intend to use him again."

In the 7 October attack, Hamas killed around 1,200 people and took 240 hostages, some of whom were released during a short-lived truce at the end of November.

Hamas officials in Gaza say Israel has killed more than 17,177 people in its retaliatory campaign, including about 7,000 children.

Update: An earlier version of this article described Refaat Alareer as controversial and has been amended to make clear that it was his comments about the 7 October attacks which were controversial and caused huge offence.