Award-winning Israeli author and peace activist David Grossman has described his country’s military campaign in Gaza as “genocide”, stating he uses the term with a “broken heart.”
His remarks come just days after a leading Israeli human rights group also characterized the situation using the same term, amid mounting global concern over starvation and humanitarian conditions in the besieged enclave.
“For many years, I refrained from using the word ‘genocide’,” Grossman told Italy’s La Repubblica in an interview published Friday.
“But now, after seeing the images and speaking with people who were there, I can no longer avoid it.”
Grossman told the paper he was using the word “with immense pain and with a broken heart.”
“This word is an avalanche: once you say it, it just gets bigger, like an avalanche. And it adds even more destruction and suffering,” he said.
Grossman’s works, which have been translated into dozens of languages, have won many international prizes.
He also won Israel’s top literary prize in 2018, the Israel Prize for Literature, for his work spanning more than three decades.
He said it was “devastating” to “put the words ‘Israel’ and ‘famine’ together” because of the Holocaust and our “supposed sensitivity to the suffering of humanity.”
The celebrated author has long been a critic of the Israeli government.
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