Daughter of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer killed in Israel airstrike in Gaza

A daughter of Palestinian poet and academic, Refaat Alareer, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza City on Friday, about four months after her father was killed in a similar attack, Anadolu Agency reports.

“Shaimaa Alareer, her husband, and their infant child were martyred in an Israeli airstrike targeting their home in the Al-Rimal neighbourhood, western Gaza City,” a medical source at the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City said.

The source added that “the bodies of the three martyrs were brought to the hospital earlier today, Friday, after being extracted from under the rubble of the destroyed house.”

Shaimaa, the eldest daughter of one of the most famous Palestinian poets, writers and translators, got married about a year and a half ago to the Palestinian engineer, Mohammed Seyam, and gave birth to their first child about four months ago.

WATCH: Prominent writer and scholar Refaat Alareer killed in Israeli air strike

Refaat Alareer was killed, along with several members of his family, in an Israeli airstrike targeting them at their home in the Shujaiyya neighbourhood last December.

Alareer was one of the most prominent young Palestinian writers in English, known for his book “Gaza Writes Back”, in addition to hundreds of articles published in Arab, European, and American media outlets.

For many years, Refaat taught English literature and poetry at the Islamic University of Gaza and was one of the founders of the “We Are Not Numbers” initiative, which paired writers from Gaza with mentors abroad to help them write their stories in English.

Flouting the International Court of Justice’s provisional rulings, Israel continues its onslaught on the Gaza Strip where at least 34,356 Palestinians have been killed, mostly women and children, and 77,368 injured since 7 October, according to Palestinian health authorities.

Israel has pounded the Gaza Strip since a cross-border attack by Hamas, which Tel Aviv says killed nearly 1,200 people.

However, since then, it has been revealed by Haaretz that helicopters and tanks of the Israeli army had, in fact, killed many of the 1,139 soldiers and civilians claimed by Israel to have been killed by the Palestinian Resistance.

The Israeli war on Gaza has pushed 85 per cent of the Territory’s population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water, and medicine, while 60 per cent of the enclave’s infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.

OPINION: ‘Let it be a tale’: On Refaat Alareer and the martyrdom of the Gaza intellectual