In May -- about a year after Yurfest saved the dismembered hand of an Islamic Jihad bomb-maker -- the veteran surgeon left work at a hospital in the Galilee city of Afula to return a film to a video shop at a local shopping mall.

At the entrance to the mall, Yurfest set off a metal detector scanning shoppers and was asked by a security guard to stand aside and empty out the contents of his pockets.

"As I was doing that, a girl wearing a simple dress passed me. I remember the back of her neck. It was covered with sweat...I never saw her face," Yurfest recalled.

"I was standing shoulder-to-shoulder next to her while another security guard scanned her with a metal detector. Suddenly the metal-detector started beeping and beeping.

"At the same time I was told I could go. I put my keys in my pocket. I heard more and more beeps from the metal detector scanning the girl. Then just as I was about to walk off there was an enormous explosion," Yurfest said.

The young woman standing next to Yurfest was 19-year-old Palestinian suicide bomber Hiba Daraghmeh, a gifted English literature student and a devout Muslim who usually covered herself from head to toe in a traditional Islamic veil.

But Daraghmeh removed her veil to carry out the bombing in Afula last May, disguising herself in the fashionable clothes of a modern Israel woman so nobody would suspect she had a 11-pound bomb of high-grade explosives strapped to her body.