Today marks 53 years since the assassination of Ghassan Kanafani, the prominent Palestinian writer, intellectual and political thinker. He was killed in Beirut on 8 July 1972, when Israeli agents detonated a car bomb. The explosion also took the life of his 17-year-old niece, Lamees.

Born in Acre in April 1936, Kanafani and his family were displaced during the Nakba of 1948. They fled to Damascus, later settling in Beirut. The experience of forced exile profoundly shaped his literary and political outlook, imbuing his work with themes of dispossession, resistance, and identity.

Kanafani’s literary legacy includes seminal works such as Men in the Sun, Return to Haifa, Death of Bed Number 12, and The Land of Sad Oranges. Through these narratives, he explored exile not merely as a geographic condition, but as a psychological and moral state. His fiction became a cornerstone of modern Palestinian literature, offering emotionally charged reflections on loss, memory and belonging.

In addition to his fiction, Kanafani was an accomplished journalist. From 1969 until his death, he edited the weekly publication Al-Hadaf, which he co-founded in Beirut. His political essays and editorials provided sharp analysis of Palestinian national identity, cultural resistance, and regional affairs, amplifying the Palestinian voice across the Arab world and beyond.

More than five decades after his assassination, Kanafani’s work remains strikingly relevant. His words continue to speak to new generations facing the enduring realities of occupation and exile.

As he once wrote, “The question of death does not belong to the dead, but to those who remain alive.” His legacy is not confined to the past. In a world where the struggle for justice and identity persists, his literature endures as an act of resistance.