ROME - David Grossman, one of Israel's most prominent authors, told Italian daily La Repubblica he has decided to start using the word "genocide" to describe the situation in Gaza.
"For years, I refused to use the word 'genocide.' But now I can't hold back from using it, after what I've read in the newspapers, after the images I've seen and after talking to people who have been there", he said in the interview published in the paper's print edition on Friday.
Grossman said coming to the realization that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza was an extremely painful process on a personal level, but that he now found such conclusion inescapable.
"I want to speak as a person who has done everything he could to avoid having to call Israel a genocidal state. And now, with immense pain and a broken heart, I have to say that it is happening before my eyes. Genocide," he said.
In mid-July, an opinion piece titled "I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It" in the New York Times by Professor Omer Bartov, an Israeli professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, made the case for the use of the word genocide.
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