GAZA, (PIC)
Israeli occupation army has killed in its ongoing bloody devastating aggression on Gaza so many distinguished and talented Palestinian figures, and ruined remarkable scientific and educational landmarks in the Strip.
Among thousands of martyrs were scientific, academic and media figures, including President of the Islamic University in Gaza, Dr. Sufyan Tayeh who was killed along with his family, and was ranked among the top 2% of researchers around the world.
Assassination
Since the killing of Palestinian professor and author Refaat Al-Areer by an Israeli airstrike on Wednesday, December 6, there has been clear evidence that he was deliberately killed.
He had previously received death threats to silence his voice that has influenced so many people around the globe with his solid rational arguments refuting Israeli false narratives on various foreign media platforms.
Euro-Med Monitor for Human Rights accused Israel with deliberate killing of the prominent Palestinian academic Refaat Al-Areer.
According to Euro-Med Monitor, which collected information from eyewitnesses and family members, “the apartment where Refaat and his family were sheltering was surgically bombed out of the entire building where it is located; and he was killed weeks after receiving death threats over the internet and mobile phone from Israeli accounts.
The witnesses reported that on Wednesday, Al-Areer was killed in his sister’s home in al-Sidra neighborhood in al-Daraj area in Gaza city. He was killed along with his brother, nephew, his sister and three of her children, while the wife of his brother and two other children were injured.
Euro-Med Monitor said that “Refaat was displaced multiple times during this war. A few days ago, Refaat moved with his wife and children to a UNRWA school in al-Tufah neighborhood in Gaza according to his family.”
A close friend of Refaat’s, however, told Euro-Med Monitor that the Palestinian writer and intellectual “had received an anonymous phone call from someone who identified himself as an Israeli officer and threatened him that they knew precisely the school where he was located and that they were about to get to his location with the advancement of Israeli ground troops.”
Euro-Med Monitor was not able to verify the credibility of its threat but stated that the call “contributed to prompting Refaat to move back to his sister’s apartment, believing it was more concealed than an open and overcrowded school.”
The call was not the first death threat received by Al-Areer. For weeks since the start of the Israeli aggression, Refaat has been receiving numerous death threats and hateful messages from Israeli accounts on social media after prominent public figures singled him out for harassment and incitement”, according to his family and friends.
In 2014, Israeli warplanes blew up Al-Areer’s house in al-Shujaiya east of Gaza, killing 30 members of his family and relatives.
The Geneva-based human rights organization called for “an immediate investigation into this apparently deliberate and targeted killing of a prominent Palestinian academic, writer, poet, and activist and holding Israel accountable for his assassination.”
The Voice of Gaza
Refaat Al-Areer is one of the founders of the ‘We Are Not Numbers’ project and professor at the Islamic University of Gaza.
Al-Areer was not an ordinary intellectual. He was an educator, who has inspired countless young people in Gaza to take charge of their own narrative and to tell the story of Gaza and Palestine based on their own experiences.
Dr. Refaat Al-Areer was an academic, editor, poet, writer, and lecturer. He authored many books and wrote tens of stories about Gaza, including the 2014 anthology Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine, published by Just World Books.
Dr. Refaat Al-Areer, 44 years old, was a Palestinian academic born in Gaza. He obtained his Ph.D. in English literature from Putra University in Malaysia in 2017 and worked as a faculty member in the English Language Department at the Islamic University of Gaza.
The Palestinian Information Center (PIC) also mourned with grief and pride Dr. Refaat Al-Areer, describing him as one of the pillars of the PIC English language site and the founder and manager of its social media department.
In December 2018, Refaat Al-Areer’s Twitter account was suspended under the pretext of violating the standards. It was one of the most active English-language accounts, with around 90,000 followers, including many politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and activists around the world.
At that time, Al-Areer believed that exposing the Israeli crimes and his continuous and intensive coverage of the situation in Palestine under occupation, as well as demanding the Palestinians’ right to live in freedom and dignity and resist the occupation, were the reasons behind the deletion of his account.
