The attackers entered at approximately 9:40 PM, detonating crude bombs and opening fire. Panicked staff bolted upstairs; an Argentinian-Italian chef named Diego Rossini led several employees onto the rooftops of adjacent buildings. Eight staff members hid in a second-floor restroom filled with yeast and flour, texting their families in the dark. The attackers searched the building, shouting "Bengali people, come out" and "If you're Muslims, come out." Finding no answer from behind the restroom door, they locked it and moved on. Downstairs, they separated the hostages. Muslims were given food and water. Non-Muslims -- nine Italians, seven Japanese, one Indian student, and others -- were not. Police detective Rabiul Karim and station officer Salauddin Khan were among the first responders, rushing toward the gunfire. Both were shot dead.

Dhaka Metropolitan Police Commissioner Asaduzzaman Mia personally entered the building and managed to extract nine people before the attackers' resistance forced a withdrawal. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was briefed and ordered the commissioner to pull back; the army chief was en route. Through the small hours, the attackers released groups of hostages they deemed Muslim, including women in hijabs. They offered a young Bangladeshi man named Faraaz Hossain the chance to leave. Hossain, a student at Emory University, refused. His friends -- two young women, one Indian and one Bangladeshi -- were not permitted to go. He stayed with them. All three were killed. Inside the restaurant, the attackers strapped a staff member named Miraj to a chair rigged with explosives, creating a human shield. Pro-Islamic State accounts circulated photographs from inside the bakery showing bodies and blood on the tiled floor.

At 7:40 AM on 2 July, commandos of the 1st Para-Commando Battalion, led by Brigadier General Mujibur Rahman, launched Operation Thunderbolt. Nine armored personnel carriers smashed through the bakery's perimeter wall. Within thirteen minutes, the commandos had secured the building. All five attackers were killed in the firefight. Thirteen surviving hostages were rescued. In the chaos, a bakery chef was mistakenly identified as an attacker and shot dead by the commandos. The final toll: twenty hostages killed, two police officers dead, five attackers killed, and two staff members dead. Autopsies of the nine Italian victims revealed that they had been tortured -- slashed with knives and mutilated. Italian authorities described their deaths as "slow and agonizing."

The attackers' identities shattered the assumption that extremism grows only in poverty. Two of the five -- Meer Sameh Mubashir and Rohan Imtiaz -- had attended Scholastica, one of Dhaka's most prestigious English-medium schools, which follows the Cambridge International Examinations curriculum. Both had disappeared from their families months before the attack. The Bangladeshi government insisted the attackers belonged to the banned Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), not the Islamic State, despite IS claiming responsibility and releasing photographs of the gunmen posing before its banners. The alleged mastermind, Canadian-Bangladeshi Tamim Chowdhury, was killed in a raid on 27 August 2016. Seven suspects were convicted and sentenced to death in November 2019; those sentences were later commuted to life imprisonment.

Two years after the attack, a memorial sculpture called "Deepto Shopoth" was installed in Gulshan, honoring the two police officers who died responding to the crisis. In August 2024, following the fall of Sheikh Hasina's government, the sculpture was demolished and replaced with posters of the banned Islamist organization Hizb ut-Tahrir. The erasure of the memorial mirrors a broader pattern in Dhaka, where monuments and museums become targets whenever power changes hands. What happened at the Holey Artisan Bakery on that July night is not in dispute -- the dead are named, the attackers identified, the verdicts rendered. What the attack means for Bangladesh, and whether its memory will be honored or instrumentalized, remains an open and volatile question.