Open-air soccer game screenings come to Gaza City
A giant screen at al-Qutaibah Square in Gaza City has been showing the UEFA Europa League matches, easing the suffering of Gazans amid the power outage and unemployment crises.
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — In a first-of-its-kind initiative, Al-Majd Advertising Solutions set up a giant screen operated by a power generator in al-Qutaibah Square in southern Gaza City last month to show the UEFA Europa League matches.
After the end of the soccer league and with the start of the holy month of Ramadan in late May, organizers plan on screening religious and historical films and documentaries.
This initiative aims to provide free entertainment for citizens in an attempt to ease the electricity crisis in the Gaza Strip, following the bombing of the only power plant in 2006, and to alleviate the suffering of Gazans under the Israeli blockade for more than a decade.
“As an experiment, we started with a giant screen at al-Qutaibah Square, but a high turnout by young Gazans even late at night pushed us to think of ways to expand the initiative in the Gaza Strip,” Leila al-Saadi, the director of public relations at Al-Majd Advertising Solutions, told Al-Monitor.
