Popcorn and cartoons: A Gaza cinema gives girls a brief escape from war

Gaza City, Gaza Strip – Every Thursday, 14-year-old Natalie al-Hatoum looks forward to one thing. She gets ready early, says goodbye to her mother and heads to the cinema.

But this isn’t your typical multiplex. This is Gaza, which has gone through almost three years of a genocidal Israeli war . There’s a ticket booth and popcorn, but it’s all part of the show – a “cinema experience” rather than the real thing.

Instead of a movie screen, there’s a TV, and instead of theatre seats, there are plastic chairs.

The girls who attend the weekly film screenings organised by a charity in Deir el-Balah are all displaced like Natalie and are looking for any kind of escape from the lives they’ve been living since the war started.

“I really like the cinema because it gives us a change of atmosphere. It makes you feel like you’re not living through the war, like you’re not living through these difficult days,” she says.

Natalie is originally from Gaza City’s Remal neighbourhood , but she has been living displaced in a single rented room in central Gaza with her family since their home was bombed during the early months of the war, which began in October 2023 and has so far killed more than 73,000 Palestinians.

Natalie and her family only narrowly escaped that attack, and she also lost her grandfather, grandmother and a cousin during the war.

“These incidents affected me a lot psychologically,” she says. “I was very shocked. I always remember the memories I had with my cousin, and I get very sad.”