GAZA today resembles Japan 80 years ago, the Nobel prize-winning survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings said on Saturday.

Speaking to reporters in Tokyo after the Norwegian Nobel prize committee awarded the prize to the Nihon Hidankyo group, co-chairman Toshiyuki Mimaki said: “I thought for sure it would be the people working so hard in Gaza, as we’ve seen.

“In Gaza, bleeding children are being held by their parents. It’s like in Japan 80 years ago.”

The fast-dwindling group of atomic bomb survivors say they will use the shrinking time that they have left to convey the horror they witnessed first-hand 79 years ago.

The groups, representing the roughly 106,000 remaining bomb survivors, known as hibakusha, see the prize and the international attention as their last chance to get their message out to younger generations.

Terumi Tanaka, 91, who survived the Nagasaki bombing at the age of 13, said he hoped the award would help raise public awareness of the need to join hands to achieve a world without nuclear weapons. 

“Now we face the crisis in which nuclear weapons may be actually used and they are not even going away, we need to properly communicate with younger people and teach them about atomic weapons and the work we have been doing,” he said.