Award-winning Israeli author David Grossman called his country's campaign in Gaza "genocide" and said he was using the term with a "broken heart".
This came days after a major Israeli rights group also used the same term, amid growing global alarm over starvation in the besieged territory.
"For many years, I refused to use that term: 'genocide'," the prominent writer and peace activist told Italian daily La Repubblica in an interview published on Friday, AFP reported.
"But now, after the images I have seen and after talking to people who were there, I can't help using 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.
