With nearly forty thousand Palestinians killed by Israel’s response to the October 7 Hamas assault, the war in Gaza has proven Joseph Stalin’s old adage that one death is a tragedy and a thousand mere statistics. The fates of individual Gazans are rarely discussed, certainly at the beginning of the war and in the Israeli army (IDF)’s daily operational reports to date.

Among the few Palestinians whose names have reached Western newspapers are the lyricist Refaat Alareer and the six-year-old girl Hind Rajab. With few if any Western media outlets providing detailed reports of individual Palestinian victims in Gaza, it has been left to Palestinian journalists, the international student Palestine solidarity movement, and civil society protests to convey the stories of Alareer and Rajab to Western audiences.

There is no longer any doubt that an Israeli air strike killed Alareer. His poem, If I Must Die, published a few weeks before his death, has already become one of the twenty-first century’s most famous.