Gaza has become worse than hell on earth, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross has told the BBC.

In an interview at the ICRC’s headquarters in Geneva, the organisation’s president Mirjana Spoljaric said “humanity is failing” as it watched the horrors of the Gaza war.

Speaking in a room close to a case displaying the ICRC’s three Nobel Peace Prizes, I asked Ms Spoljaric about remarks she made in April, that Gaza was “hell on earth”, and if anything had happened since to change her mind.

“It has become worse… We cannot continue to watch what is happening. It’s surpassing any acceptable, legal, moral, and humane standard. The level of destruction, the level of suffering.

“More importantly, the fact that we are watching a people entirely stripped of its human dignity. It should really shock our collective conscience.”

She added that states must do more to end the war, end the suffering of Palestinians and release Israeli hostages.

The words, clearly carefully chosen, of the president of the ICRC carry moral weight.

The International Red Cross is a global humanitarian organisation that has been working to alleviate suffering in wars for more than a century and a half.

It is also the custodian of the Geneva Conventions, the body of international humanitarian law that is intended to regulate the conduct of war and protect civilians and other non-combatants. The most recent version, the fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, was adopted after the Second World War and was intended to stop the mass killing of civilians from happening again.

Israel, I reminded her, justifies its actions in Gaza as self-defence.

“Every state has a right to defend itself,” she said.

“And every mother has a right to see her children return. There’s no excuse for hostage-taking. There is no excuse to depriving children from their access to food, health, and security. There are rules in the conduct of hostilities that every party to every conflict has to respect.”

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