Gaza children watch "The Lion King" amid rubble

• The image shows children watching the film in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood, surrounded by bombed-out buildings, rubble and displacement tents. 

A photograph of Palestinian children watching Disney's The Lion King at an open-air screening in Gaza City has been viewed more than 9.2 million times since the State of Palestine's mission to the United Nations shared it on X on Sep. 6. 

Palestinian children watch Lion King in Gaza.

📸 Omar Ashtawy pic.twitter.com/YkIk0RYAwY

— State of Palestine (@Palestine_UN) September 6, 2026

The image, taken by Palestinian photographer Omar Ashtawy on Aug. 30, shows children and some adults seated on the ground in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood, watching the 1994 animated film projected onto a screen. 

Bombed-out buildings, piles of rubble and displacement tents encircle the audience on all sides. 

Mobile cinema

The screening was organised by the Masharawi Fund for Films and Filmmakers in Gaza, through its mobile cinema project Little Wings. 

Ashtawy, writing on Instagram, said the initiative provides children with a recreational space amid the difficult conditions and widespread destruction caused by the war.

The fund is run by Rashid Masharawi, a Palestinian filmmaker born in Gaza City in 1962 to a family of refugees from Jaffa, who grew up in the Shati refugee camp. 

He has for years operated mobile cinemas in Palestinian refugee camps and organised an annual children's film festival before founding the fund after the war began.

"A child remains a child"

The photograph spread quickly after the UN mission posted it, picked up by users and outlets describing it as both heartbreaking and, for a brief moment, hopeful. 

French journalist Hadi Hassin, sharing the image, said it was taken in an improvised cinema in the middle of a displacement camp, evidence, he wrote, that “a child remains a child, even in the midst of war”.

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