The situation for children in Gaza is similar to the situation in Japan at the end of World War II, the co-head of new Nobel Peace Prize winner Nihon Hidankyo said Friday.

"In Gaza, children in blood are being held. It's like in Japan 80 years ago," Toshiyuki Mimaki told a news conference in Tokyo.

The Nobel Peace Prize was on Friday awarded to the Japanese anti-nuclear group Nihon Hidankyo, a grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also known as Hibakusha.

The group, founded in 1956, received the honor "for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again," said Jorgen Watne Frydnes, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo.

The co-head of the group expressed surprise at winning the award.

"Never did I dream this could happen," Mimaki told reporters in Tokyo with tears in his eyes.

The Nobel committee expressed alarm that the international "nuclear taboo" that developed in response to the atomic bomb attacks of August 1945 was "under pressure".