After This Palestinian Poet Was Killed By Israeli Airstrikes, People Translated His Last Poem Into Different Languages

An Israeli airstrike in Gaza has killed Dr. Refaat Alareer, a renowned Palestinian poet and academic. He was 44.

The same airstrike on Dec. 6 also killed several members of his family, including his brother, his brother’s son, his sister and three of her children.

Alareer was a professor at the Islamic University of Gaza, where he taught literature and creative writing.

He also co-founded We Are Not Numbers, an organization that taught young Palestinians in writer storytelling as a means of resistance.

After the war began, Alareer stayed in Gaza and regularly posted updates about the situation.

Weeks before he was killed, he shared a poem on his social media accounts on Nov. 1 named “If I Must Die.”

The poem reads:

“If I must die
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail) so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh,
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale.”

Rights group Euro-Med Monitor said that it appeared that Alareer had been deliberately targeted, as the apartment he and his family were in was “surgically bombed out of the entire building”.

Euro-Med Monitor said that the airstrike only targeted the apartment Rafaat was located on the second floor of the three-story building and not the entire building, meaning “the apartment was the target and not possible collateral damage.”

Prior to his killing, Alareer had received weeks of death threats both both online and over the phone from Israeli accounts, the monitor said.

He had been sheltering at a UN-run school with his wife and children but moved to his sister’s apartment after he received a Israeli threat over the phone saying they knew the school he was at.

Alareer had been seen by some as a controversial figure after he compared Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7 to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”, the largest act of Jewish resistance against the Nazis in occupied Poland during World War II, according to Al Jazeera.

The news of Alareer’s killing led to an outpouring of grief and tributes, with people on X proceeding to translate “If I Must Die” into various different languages to ensure his words live on, like he wished.

Here are some of the translations.

Chinese

Spanish

Hindi

Arabic

Japanese

French

Russian

Turkish

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