The grave of murdered poet Refaat Alareer finally has a headstone.

Earlier this week, ten months after the body of murdered Palestinian poet and professor Refaat Alareer was recovered and laid to rest in the Ibn Marwan Cemetery in Gaza, his loved ones were finally able to place a headstone on his grave.

To Refaat Alareer’s friends and loved ones around the world,

Today, 10 months after we recovered his body and laid him to rest in the Ibn Marwan cemetery, we were finally able to build his grave and place the headstone, after immense difficulty reaching the site near the yellow… https://t.co/1JkVvV54Ew pic.twitter.com/BRy2Xlcx1N

— عاصم النبيه Asem Alnabih (@AsemAlnabeh) January 10, 2026

According to Asem Alnabih, an Alaraby TV correspondent and friend of the late Alareer, the headstone was completed more than nine months ago but Israeli bombardment made it too dangerous to approach the cemetery, which lies to the east of Gaza City, until recently.

On December 7, 2023, Alareer was killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike that also killed his brother, his sister, and four of her children. Less than five months later, Alareer’s daughter and infant grandchild were also killed in an Israeli airstrike on their home in the Al-Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City.

Dr. Refaat Alareer had been a beloved professor of literature and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza, where he taught since 2007. He was the co-editor of Gaza Unsilenced (2015) and the editor of Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine (2014). In his contribution to the 2022 collection Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, titled “Gaza Asks: When Shall this Pass?”, Refaat writes:

It shall pass, I keep hoping. It shall pass, I keep saying. Sometimes I mean it. Sometimes I don’t. And as Gaza keeps gasping for life, we struggle for it to pass, we have no choice but to fight back and to tell her stories. For Palestine.

Alareer was also one of the founders of We Are Not Numbers, a nonprofit organization launched in Gaza after Israel’s 2014 attack and dedicated to creating “a new generation of Palestinian writers and thinkers who can bring together a profound change to the Palestinian cause.”

Through his popular Twitter account, “Refaat in Gaza,” Alareer vehemently condemned the ongoing atrocities committed against his people by Israeli forces, as well as the successive U.S. administrations that enabled them.

In the months following his murder, Alareer’s poem “If I Must Die” became both a source of solace and a rallying cry for hundreds of thousands of people around the world. The closing lines of this poem, “If I must die, / Let it bring hope; / Let it be a tale,”  are inscribed upon Alareer’s headstone.