Palestinian poet Refaat Alarir, one of the best-known members of a new generation of writers who often wrote in English to tell the stories of the people of the Gaza Strip to a wider audience, was killed in an Israeli bombardment, friends said Thursday night.

“The killing of Refaat is tragic, painful and infuriating. It’s a huge loss,” his friend, Palestinian journalist Ahmed Alnauk, said via X (the former Twitter), after deadly Israeli bombardments last Thursday night in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, according to the Health Ministry of the Hamas government.

“My heart is broken, my friend and colleague Refaat Alarir was killed along with his family a few minutes ago (…) I don’t want to believe it. We liked to pick strawberries together,” Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha also reported via X.

“Rest in peace Refaat Alarir. We will continue to be enlightened by your wisdom, today and forever,” said author and journalist Ramzi Barood via X.

The specialist website Literary Hub paid tribute to the deceased.

A professor of English at the Islamic University of Gaza, where he mainly taught the works of Shakespeare, Refaat Alarir co-founded the “We are not numbers” initiative, which pairs writers in Gaza with “mentors” abroad. that help them write in English and narrate their reality.

He edited the book “Gaza writes back”, a chronicle of life in the Gaza Strip by young writers, and wrote the book “Gaza unsilenced”.

In retaliation for the October 7 attack by Hamas, the Israeli military launched large-scale operations with the declared goal of “eliminating” the Palestinian Islamist movement, in power in the Gaza Strip since 2007, a “terrorist” organization according to Israel, the USA and the EU. The ongoing war has killed over 17,000 people, 70% of whom were women, children and teenagers.

A few days after the Israeli army began ground operations, Refaat Alarir announced that he would not leave the northern part of the Gaza Strip, the center of hostilities at the time.

On November 1, he published in X a poem written in English, which was widely circulated, under the title “If I must die”. It ends with the phrases: “let it bring hope/let it become a fairy tale”.