The Palestine Festival of Literature
Brian Cox has read a verse by a beloved Palestinian poet who was killed on December 7th by an Israeli airstrike.
The poem, entitled ‘If I Must Die’, was written by Refaat Alareer before he was reportedly killed during an aerial raid on Gaza.
The 44-year-old, who was also a professor at a university in Gaza, wrote the powerful verse as Israeli warplanes continued to strike parts of the Gaza Strip in relentless bombardments, including some of the dwindling slivers of land Palestinians had been told to evacuate to in the territory’s south.
The overall death toll in Gaza since the start of the war has surpassed 17,400, the majority of them women and children, according to the health ministry in Hamas-controlled Gaza, which does not differentiate between civilians and combatants in its count.
A study published by an Israeli newspaper, meanwhile, has found the aerial bombing campaign by Israel in Gaza is the most indiscriminate in terms of civilian casualties in recent years.
Civilians make up 61 per cent of Gaza deaths from airstrikes, it found, with the civilian proportion of death higher than the average in all world conflicts in 20th century.
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