4 February 2025
Refaat Alareer: A Voice That Will Never Be Silenced
Palestinian academic Dr Refaat Alareer exposed Israeli crimes and Western media bias in a BBC interview. Less that two months later, an Israeli airstrike killed him and his family.
On 8 October 2023, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett told a BBC interviewer:
“A home, a school, a hospital that hosts terrorists is not a home, it’s not a school or a hospital, it’s a terror base.”
Bennett has a history of making genocidal statements. In July 2013, during a cabinet meeting on the release of Palestinian prisoners, he reportedly said: “I have killed many Arabs in my life, and there’s no problem with that.”
In December 2021, he called settler violence against Palestinians “insignificant” even as attacks escalated.
He supported Israel’s total blockade of the Gaza Strip, stating, “I’m not going to feed electricity to my enemies.”
The BBC interviewer did not challenge Bennett’s remarks. Instead she asked Palestinian poet, writer, and academic Dr Refaat Alareer who at that very moment, while being interviewed, was sheltering with his family under intense Israeli bombardment:
“Tell us what is happening where you are?”
Anxiety was evident in his demeanour, yet he responded:
“What is happening is that an Israeli official is inciting genocide against Palestinians, and the BBC is feeding him thoughts, perhaps suggesting taking control of the Gaza Strip. This is what’s going on! The Western mainstream media is complicit, whitewashing Israeli crimes …”
The interviewer interrupted:
“I think you will find they are quite legitimate questions to be asked from a former Israeli Prime Minister … I’d love to know what is happening where you are, sir.”
Alareer:
“The war criminal before me (referring to Bennett) was suggesting bombing schools, homes, and hospitals, and you said not a word to push back.”
Again, she defended Bennett:
“He was talking about if there were Hamas militants in those buildings, for clarification.”
Alareer pressed on, undeterred:
“We know Israel is going to kill us anyway. We are starving, besieged, dispossessed, displaced. Israel wants us kneeling. So why not fight back and die in dignity?”
On 6 December 2023, an Israeli airstrike killed Alareer, along with his brother Salah, Salah’s son Mohammed, his sister Asmaa, and her three children: Alaa, Yahia, and Mohammed.
Months later, on 26 April 2024, an Israeli bombing killed his eldest daughter, Shaimaa, her husband Mohammed Siyam, and their newborn baby.
In January 2025, Refaat’s body was found in a makeshift grave and reinterred at Ibn Marwan Cemetery near Al-Shujaiya—the neighbourhood where he was born, lived, and now rests.
Alareer co-founded We Are Not Numbers, mentored young Palestinian writers, and edited Gaza Writes Back (2014). His final work, If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose (2024), became a bestseller.
A poet, professor, and one of the most powerful voices of Palestinian resistance.
They may have killed his body, but his ideas, his dreams, and his stories live on—in the hearts and minds of Palestinians and people across the world.