On the evening of June 30, Mohammad Abu Shamaleh was reaching for the door of a cafe, a sanctuary north of Gaza’s port, when the world exploded around him.

The 25-year-old had come to Al-Baqa cafe, as he did most evenings, seeking what had become precious commodities in Gaza: electricity and internet. 

As a field coordinator with a nonprofit, Abu Shamaleh needed an internet connection to send reports, to help people, to do the work that kept him moving through a city where standing still felt like surrender.

His mother, Sahar Yaghi, had begged him countless times: "Please, son, don't go to crowded places." She knew, as every mother in Gaza knows, that gatherings attract death. 

But Abu Shamaleh always returned to Al-Baqa, the beachfront cafe that had become his refuge, his office, his small piece of normalcy in a world gone mad.

On that evening, his hand touched the cafe's entrance, an Israeli missile struck. In an instant, what had been laughter and conversation became screaming and smoke. At least 39 people died that night, dozens more lay wounded, and Gaza lost another fragment of its soul.

"Everything was destroyed in a moment," Yaghi tells TRT World, her voice trembling with the memory, as she sits next to her badly wounded son, laying in a bed in Al-Shifaa Medical Complex.

"His right leg got broken, shrapnel tore through his back and body. God saved him... but his friends are still fighting for their lives in the hospital."

When Abu Shamaleh finally spoke to his mother after the attack, his words revealed the deeper wounds: "When I woke up, the sound of the missile was still in my ear. I kept screaming just to hear my own voice. I wanted my voice to be louder than the missile's sound, to drive it out of my head."

The photographer who captured beauty in hell

Among those who didn't make it home that night was Ismail Abu Hatab, a 32-year-old photographer whose camera had become an extension of his soul.

For over a decade, Abu Hateb had dedicated himself to showing the world not just Gaza's pain, but its stubborn, persistent beauty.

"Ismail didn't just love the camera—the camera loved him," says his friend Hikmat Al-Masri, who worked alongside him for 15 years. "I've travelled with many photographers, but Ismail was different. He would paint beauty in his mind, then capture it with his lens. He always said, 'I want to photograph the most beautiful thing in Gaza.'"

That commitment nearly killed him once before. In November 2023, early in the current war, shrapnel tore through Abu Hateb's foot, forcing him to stop working for nearly a year.

But he refused to stay down. He returned with an exhibition called The Tent, documenting everyday life in wartime Gaza—work that travelled to Los Angeles, touching hearts thousands of miles from the Mediterranean shore.

The night he died, Abu Hateb was planning his next exhibition, dreaming of taking his tent series to France. He wanted the world to see Gaza through his eyes—not as a news story that flickers past, but as a place where people lived, loved, and created beauty despite everything.

When Al-Masri received the call about his friend's death, the grief hit him harder than when his own father died. "I hung up and ran to find our photos together, on my laptop, on my phone. I cried looking at every picture, every moment with him rushing back at once."

Abu Hateb's death brought the journalist toll in Gaza to 227—making this the deadliest conflict ever recorded for media workers. But numbers can't capture what was lost when his camera fell silent forever.

The cafe that held Gaza's dreams

For those who knew Al-Baqa cafe, its destruction felt like losing a piece of their own hearts. Nour Al-Safadi left Gaza for Cairo three years ago, but the beachfront cafe never left her memory. It was where she had laughed with friends, worked on projects, and found moments of peace.

"They bombed Al-Baqa coffee shop, the place that was my home," she tells TRT World from her exile. "It was our refuge for laughter, for talking, for work, and for silence too. Al-Baqa wasn't just a cafe—it was a breathing space, it was memory, it was people."

It was also a meeting point for everyday people, a venue offering rare respite for a helpless population surrounded by death. Its location by the shore radiated calmness and tranquillity amid a dystopian setting.

When news of the bombing broke, Al-Safadi found herself frantically checking social media, messaging friends, desperate for those two words that had become Gaza's most precious phrase: "I'm okay."

Not everyone could send those words. Along with Abu Hateb, the cafe claimed the life of Atef the waiter, whose laughter had become part of the place's soul.

For journalist Doaa Shaheen, who had made Al-Baqa her second office, the bombing represented something more sinister than military strategy.

"Why bomb a recreational place?" she asks. "It shows they're not just fighting us as a military force—they're fighting us as human beings, as people of Gaza searching for moments of dignity and rest."

When nowhere is safe

The attack on Al-Baqa came amid a broader pattern of strikes on civilian gathering places. In recent weeks, Israeli forces have killed people at aid distribution sites, turning the search for food into a deadly gamble.

The overall toll has surpassed 55,000 Palestinian deaths, according to Gaza's health ministry, with some accounts putting the number even higher, and almost the entire population of 2.3 million displaced.

"There's no longer a safe inch in Gaza," Shaheen explains. "Our homes are bombed, hospitals targeted, markets destroyed. Now even places of rest and laughter. They don't just want to kill us—they want to erase our existence completely."

But in the rubble of Al-Baqa, something refuses to die. Mohammad Abu Shamaleh, still healing from his wounds, carries forward the same determination that once drove him to risk crowded cafes for the sake of his work. 

Despite everything—the broken leg, the shrapnel, the sound of missiles that won't leave his ears—he refuses to abandon his purpose of serving his people.

"This is my home," he tells his mother. "My people need me. It's my right to live here, with my family and friends and the places I love. Our voices must be louder than the genocide, louder than this injustice. We deserve to live."

His mother, carries a simpler plea to the world: "All I hope is that the world truly listens to us. I don't want to lose my son. I don't want any other mother to stand where I'm standing now."

The cafe is gone, but what it represented—Gaza's insistence on remaining human—endures in every story told, every tear shed, and every voice raised against the darkness.

This piece is published in collaboration with Egab.