Refaat Alareer

Refaat Alareer was born in Gaza City, the capital of the Gaza governorate in Palestine, on September 23, 1979, during the Israeli occupation of Gaza. 

A native of Gaza City’s Shuja’iyya neighborhood, he received his MA in comparative literature from University College London and completed his PhD in English literature at the Universiti Putra Malaysia. 

Alareer authored If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose (OR Books, 2024), edited by Yousef M. Aljamal and listed as both a USA Today bestseller and one of the top ten books of 2024 by The New Arab. Alareer is the editor of Gaza Writes Back (Just World Books, 2014) and coeditor, alongside Laila El-Haddad, of Gaza Unsilenced (Just World Books, 2015). He was a contributor to “Life in Occupied Palestine,” a special issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, an academic publication produced by the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, guest edited by Cynthia G. Franklin, Morgan Cooper, and Ibrahim G. Aoude. While the editors worked with Alareer and other contributors that summer, Israeli forces killed Refaat’s brother, Mohammed Alareer, during Israel’s fifty-one-day siege on Gaza, leading the editors to dedicate the issue to Mohammed in the spring of 2014. 

Since 2007, Alareer had taught world literature, comparative literature, and both fiction and nonfiction creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza. He is the founder of We Are Not Numbers, an organization dedicated to sharing stories by Palestinian writers.  

On December 6, 2023, an Israeli airstrike killed Alareer, his sister, brother, and four of his nephews and nieces.