Some came to get Wi-Fi, some to hang out, one woman for “me time,” just her and a good book. Al-Baqa Cafe sat facing the beach and the waves, away from the wreckage of Gaza City. There, it seemed almost possible to relax, to forget — if only for the space of a few cups of coffee.
“Everything about the place brought back memories, of safety, of life before,” said Mohammed Abu Shamala, 25, an aid worker who grabbed a table there last month with two friends.
He had just started chatting with another friend when the place exploded. Chairs barreled through the air, he said. Dust blocked the sea from sight. Mr. Abu Shamala and his friend were slammed to the concrete floor, where blood was pooling.
“It felt like the world was pushing down on me from every direction,” he said later. “I screamed, not because of the pain, but just to hear my own voice, to make sure I was still alive.”
An Israeli warplane had bombed the cafe. The strike, on June 30, killed 32 people, Gaza’s health ministry said.
The Israeli military said it killed at least three Hamas operatives there, including a man it identified as the commander of Hamas’s naval forces in northern Gaza and two it said belonged to the group’s mortar unit. It did not provide evidence tying the men to Hamas.
But the cafe contained many others: a cross-section of residents trying to feel human again for a few hours, which is to say, all kinds of people.
Journalists there for the reliable internet. A young boxer making up with her best friend after an argument. A family having a birthday party for their little girl. Waiters chatting in the shade. They were all hit, new casualties of a war in which Israel has made it easier to order airstrikes on those it says are Hamas militants, even if it risks killing many civilians.
Gaza health officials say the death toll has topped 60,000 Palestinians since Israel began striking the enclave in response to the October 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, which Israel says killed more than 1,200 people. The Gaza officials’ figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Gaza health officials are also tracking a growing category: People who have starved to death. They say scores of people have died of malnutrition, including dozens of children, though aid workers say that is probably an undercount. It is not clear how many also had other illnesses.
Al-Baqa Cafe was busy at the time of the strike on June 30, shortly before 3 p.m. It often was, partly for offering steady Wi-Fi, and partly because the Israeli military had not ordered the beach area evacuated recently, giving people the hopeful impression that it was safe.
They were the latest to learn that no place in Gaza truly is.
“Now, instead of making drinks, we spent our time picking up human remains and wiping blood off the wooden walls,” said Yaqoub Al-Baqa, 35, the manager. “It’s beyond heartbreaking.”
The quarter-century-old cafe had been closed for much of the war as Gaza City became a repeat battlefield and residents fled. But as families returned during the two-month cease-fire that had begun in January, the cafe reopened, serving tea, coffee, crepes, ice cream and pastries, and it stayed open after Israel broke the cease-fire in March.
Many of the people there knew each other. They had been coming for years, claiming the same tables as if they, too, were old friends.
Mr. Abu Shamala and his friends usually sat in the section for single men. But given recent drone strikes on other cafes, they felt safer in the so-called family section, where women could sit together or with men they knew.
Walking in felt comfortingly familiar, he said. He waved hi to Ismail Abu Hatab, a well-known photojournalist and filmmaker, and Frans al-Salmi, an artist, before flagging down a waiter to order tea. Then he noticed Bayan Abusultan, a journalist friend he hadn’t seen in two months.
Ms. Abusultan had arrived at Al-Baqa that morning to read a book of Palestinian literary criticism and enjoy what she called a bit of “fake peace,” she later wrote on Facebook.
When she saw Mr. Abu Hatab and Ms. al-Salmi, she sat by them instead of in her usual spot, she wrote. They were filming a video for one of Mr. Abu Hatab’s international exhibitions, and they had picked that table for the nice light, they told her.
Mr. Abu Hatab was even better dressed that day than usual, she wrote, so she ribbed him gently: “You’ve got a lot of money, man!”
He denied it, laughing.
In other exhibitions abroad, Mr. Abu Hatab, 33, had shown his photographs of displaced Gazans living among the ruins. He had wanted to become successful enough to be able to move his family out of Gaza, said his brother, Abdul Hakim Abu Hatab, 23.
Instead, his earnings mostly went toward buying sacks of flour to feed his family.
Ms. al-Salmi, 36, born Amna but called Frans by everyone, was also saving up money to someday travel and sell her paintings abroad, said her sister, Alaa al-Salmi, 24.
Yet two days earlier, she had donated her whole month’s salary from her job at an aid group to children who had lost their parents during the war, her sister said.
“She didn’t leave a single shekel for herself,” her sister said.
As Ms. Abusultan, the journalist, sat down after chatting with the two, she complimented a girl sitting nearby on her beautifully embroidered blouse. The girl was laughing with her friends, she recalled. Another table opposite her was more somber: Two women in their early 20s sat there quietly, a giant pink teddy bear gift-wrapped with pink ribbon in a chair next to them.
Their names were Nidaa al-Mashharawi and Malak Musleh. Ms. al-Mashharawi worked at a charity for orphans. Ms. Musleh was a boxer with dreams of representing Palestine someday at international championships. She had been training since she was 14, ignoring social strictures that said girls shouldn’t box, said Noor Musleh, 40, her mother.
The usually inseparable best friends had recently had a spat, said Noor Musleh and Mohammad al-Mashharawi, 25, Ms. al-Mashharawi’s brother. Ms. Musleh had called her friend the night before to make up. The teddy bear was her peace offering.
But they started arguing again soon after arriving at Al-Baqa. Ms. al-Mashharawi stormed upstairs, her brother said. Ms. Musleh followed her, and they made peace again.
At another table sat Naseem Abu Sabha, 25, and Ola Abed Rabou, 22, who had gotten engaged at a more hopeful time, during the cease-fire.
They had picked a spot away from the other tables so they could talk privately, she said. To her surprise, her fiancé got her a cookie, a rare and expensive treat in Gaza these days. They dared to talk about what life might look like if they ever managed to leave Gaza. Maybe he could find a job abroad, he said.
A blast, and he lay next to her on the ground, moaning in pain. Then he fell silent.
Yet with blood staining only his back and right leg, “I believed we would walk out of the hospital together,” she said. It was only after doctors treated her injured left leg that her parents delivered the news of his death.
The Israeli military identified Mr. Abu Sabha as part of Hamas’s mortar unit, but did not provide evidence when asked. His fiancée said he had belonged to Hamas in the past but left the group before the war.
Ms. Abusultan, the journalist, was hurled to the ground alongside Mr. Abu Shamala, the friend she’d been chatting with, her book gone. A wave of shrapnel bloodied her face and body, she wrote.
Looking right, she saw a severed leg.
Then she looked at Ms. al-Salmi and Mr. Abu Hatab’s table. The artist and the photographer were dead.
So were the best friends.
Also among those killed were eight workers, said Mr. Al-Baqa, the cafe’s manager. They included Hadi and Moataz Abu Dan, 21- and 19-year-old brothers who had worked on and off at Al-Baqa since childhood.
Mr. Al-Baqa said he did not believe the Israeli military’s justifications for targeting the cafe. “There’s nothing military about this place,” he said. “It’s a cafe by the beach.”
But when they reopened in a few weeks, he said, the staff would be careful to allow in only customers they knew.
Mr. Abu Shamala, the aid worker who had come to unwind with friends, said he did not know if he could ever go back.
“That day changed me,” he said. “Al-Baqa was once the calmest, safest corner of our lives. Now it’s the darkest, most terrifying place in our memory.”
Isabel Kershner and Adam Rasgon contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
Vivian Yee is a Times reporter covering North Africa and the broader Middle East. She is based in Cairo.
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