An academic and poet, he is one of the leaders of a generation of young Gazan writers who have bet on writing in English to tell their stories. He is the author of Gaza Writes Back, a book about the Palestinian narrative that refutes the Israeli narrative.

Rifaat Rafaq Rafiq Saeed al-Arair was born on September 23, 1979, in the Shujaiya neighborhood of Gaza City. He was teaching English literature at the Islamic University in Gaza before his martyrdom, and was one of the founders of the "We Are Not Numbers" project, which paired authors from Gaza with "mentors" abroad to help them write stories about their reality in English.