AFULA, Israel (Reuters) - Israeli surgeon Shmuel Yurfest has saved the lives of many people, including an injured Palestinian suicide bomber and a militant bomb-maker whose severed hand he reattached in an intricate operation.

But after decades fighting for the lives of his patients, the 48-year- old vascular surgeon is now waging his own personal battle after being badly wounded in a Palestinian suicide bombing six months ago that left him virtually blind and deaf.

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.

Daraghmeh killed three people including a security guard and wounded 70 in the attack, one of more than 100 suicide bombings by militants since a Palestinian uprising began three years ago.

TWIST OF FATE

Yurfest has had six months to replay the incident in his mind and the year that preceded it in which he saved the life of a suicide bomber wounded when his explosives detonated prematurely and reattached the hand of a bomb-maker who only hours earlier had helped kill 13 Israeli soldiers.

"I remember commenting to one of the nurses during the surgery (on the bomb-maker), ´Tell the terrorists, when they make a bomb for me to make sure it´s a small one because I have saved the lives of many of them´," Yurfest said.

"But I never for a moment thought it would come true."

He remembers suturing an artery in the bomber´s hand, which was stained with chemicals from preparing explosives.

The next day during a follow-up examination, the bomb-maker looked him straight in the eyes -- "I had eyes then," Yurfest said -- and asked him if he would regain full use of his hand.

"I have saved the lives of many terrorists," Yurfest said from his Galilee home. "But the only reason this one walks on this planet with both his hands is because of my work."

The ethical quandary Yurfest agonized over at the time -- whether the bomb-maker would use the hand he saved to kill others -- still haunts him.

"I often think to myself whether I would do it again," he said. "I know I would treat him, although to be honest I would hope he would be punished by the legal system. I very much wish that for him and the other terrorists," Yurfest said.

WHAT WAS THE EXPRESSION ON THE BOMBER´S FACE?

Yurfest remembers lying prostate on the ground seconds after Daraghmeh detonated her bomb at the mall´s entrance.

"Everything had gone black. At first I thought, or hoped, it was an electrical shortage. Then I realized. I was blind," he said. Incapacitated by his inability to see, Yurfest played dead until he thought it was safe and then called for help.

"He´s alive. He´s alive," one man shouted upon hearing the muffled cry. An inexperienced medic rushed to help. Realizing he was going into shock Yurfest guided the medic in first aid.

"I couldn´t allow myself to die from something so stupid so I told him to please lift my feet up in the air," Yurfest said.

When the ambulance drew up at Ha´emek Hospital, none of the doctors and nurses recognized the patient with the bloodied and burned face as being Yurfest.

Critically wounded, he was transferred to a hospital that specialized in neurosurgery where he was treated for intercranial bleeding, the loss of one eye and of most of the vision of the other and partial deafness in both ears.

In between operations to save what was left of his vision, the Brazilian-born doctor, whose hobbies included scuba diving and football, has plenty of time to philosophize.

"They (the Palestinian suicide bombers) kill everything. Children, babies, doctors who have treated them and their relatives," said Yurfest, noting that about half of the patients he has treated over his career were Palestinians.

"...But no reason can justify the killing without distinction of innocent people." (© Reuters 2003 12/24/03)