GAZA: As Hollywood stars strutted their stuff amid the glamorous setting of Cannes, a different kind of a red carpet was being laid out in an eastern Gaza city.

Like its French counter-part the Karama-Gaza Human Rights Film Festival also had a red carpet, but this one ran through the city’s ruins, a legacy of last year’s brutal war with Israel.

The festival was held in the Gaza Strip on the debris of the homes that were destroyed during last summer’s Israeli offensive on the blockaded territory

It is the first festival for short and long narrative and documentary films that highlights human rights issues, mainly in Palestine, the Daily Mail reported.

It showed a number of short films on a large screen on the wall of a destroyed house in el-Shuja’ia neighborhood.

Organizer Saud Aburamadan revealed that everyone who attended was invited to walk down the red carpet that snaked through the rubble.

He told +972 Magazine: ‘We laid down the 70-meter red carpet on one of the main roads that leads to where we screened the films, a road that has nothing but destroyed homes.’

‘We invited all of the residents to walk down the red carpet to the premiere. It was our way of saying that each and every one of them is important.’

Most of the stars at Cannes use the red carpet as a catwalk, but at the Karama Festival, it had a very different purpose.

Aburamadan added: ‘For us, red is first and foremost the color of so much blood that was spilled here this summer. The blood of women, men and children.’

The war between Israel and Hamas stemmed from the abduction and killing of three Israeli teens in the West Bank in June 2014

The Gaza war — the third in just over five years — left more than 2,100 Palestinians dead, the majority of them civilians, including hundreds of children, according to Palestinian and UN officials

Israel blamed the attack on Hamas and carried out a wave of arrests, which was followed by an increase in rocket fire from Gaza that prompted Israeli airstrikes and then a ground invasion. The fighting ended with an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire on Aug. 26.