Tokyo, Japan—Israel’s ambassador to Japan criticized on Sunday a leader of Nihon Hidankyo, the atomic bomb survivors’ group awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, for comparing their experiences to the children of Gaza.
Gilad Cohen congratulated Nihon Hidankyo for winning this year’s prize but said in a post on social media platform X on Sunday the comparison drawn by the group’s co-chair Toshiyuki Mimaki “is outrageous and baseless.”
“Gaza is ruled by Hamas, a murderous terrorist organization committing a double war crime: targeting Israeli civilians, including women and children, while using its own people as human shields,” Cohen said.
“Such comparisons distort history and dishonor the victims” of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel that triggered the war in Gaza, Cohen said.
Mimaki said after the prize was announced on Friday that the plight of children in Gaza was similar to what Japan faced at the end of World War II.
“In Gaza, bleeding children are being held (by their parents). It’s like in Japan 80 years ago,” Mimaki said.
A representative for the Hiroshima chapter of Nihon Hidankyo could not be reached for comment about Cohen’s post.
Around 140,000 people were killed when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and 74,000 more were killed in Nagasaki three days later.
Survivors of the blasts later formed Nihon Hidankyo to tell the stories of those atomic bombings and to press for a world without nuclear weapons.
Nagasaki decided not to invite Cohen to mark this year’s 79th anniversary of the bombing, citing security reasons to avoid possible protests.
That decision prompted the ambassadors of the United States, Britain and the European Union, among others, to skip the ceremony and send lower-level officials instead.
The Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an Agence France Presse (AFP) tally based on official Israeli figures.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says 42,175 people, a majority of them civilians, have been killed since Israel’s military campaign began there. The United Nations acknowledges these figures to be reliable.
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