'Can there be a greater tragedy than this?'

Middle East: A loving father and a dedicated doctor, out with his daughter the night before her wedding..

Middle East: A loving father and a dedicated doctor, out with his daughter the night before her wedding ... David Horovitz in Jerusalem reports on Israel's mourning for the latest victims of Palestinian terrorism

When a Hamas suicide bomber detonated a backpack full of explosives inside Jerusalem's Café Hillel late on Tuesday night, and the first ambulances sped to the scene, the emergency room at the Sha'are Zedek hospital, a 10-minute drive away, went into its sadly familiar routine. The doctors and nurses on duty prepared to treat the first casualties, and waited, too, for others of their colleagues, off-duty but on call, to join them.

And among the first, as ever, they anticipated, would be Dr David Applebaum, the 50-year-old head of the emergency room.

An extraordinarily devoted physician, Dr Applebaum was always one of the first - either at the scene of the blast or at the hospital, whichever he could reach more quickly. On one occasion, after a bombing late at night, he had even dashed into the ward still wearing his pyjamas.

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But on Tuesday night, the minutes passed at Sha'are Zedek and the US-born Dr Applebaum did not come rushing in. And in the grisly wreckage of Café Hillel, which opened just a few months ago and was an immensely popular place to eat, drink and chat, another doctor, Yitzhak Glick, quickly discovered why.

Dr Applebaum was in the café with his daughter, Nava, when the bomber struck. And father and child were among the seven fatalities in the blast. Dr Glick recognised his colleague's body right away. The tragedy runs deeper still. Not only did a Jerusalem hospital lose one of its most skilled and respected doctors. Not only was his family torn apart. But a new family was destroyed as well: Nava Applebaum (20) was to have been married yesterday.

She and her father had stopped off at the café for a last few pre-wedding moments together, a final conversation before she embarked on her new life. Instead, the wedding guests and others whose lives the Applebaums had touched gathered in the dry Jerusalem heat yesterday for their funerals.

The two Hamas suicide bombings in Israel on Tuesday took 15 lives, and left dozens more wounded. Every affected family was yesterday mourning its own personal tragedy.

At the Jerusalem home of Alon Mizrahi (22), for example, the dead man's father was trying to absorb the loss, asking "Why? Why?" over and over, and fiercely declaring that his son, one of the two security guards on duty at the cafe, had spotted the bomber "for sure", and tussled with him near the entrance.

But the deaths of the Applebaums resonated most widely - because the father was so admired, and because of the celebration that today was supposed to have been for his daughter.

Mr Yitzhak Lau, the former chief rabbi of Israel, noted in his eulogy for the murdered doctor how the expressions of those injured in previous bombings had immediately calmed when the reassuring, bearded, bespectacled figure of Dr Applebaum came to administer treatment. Innumerable Jerusalemites had benefited from his concern and expertise over the years.

Others at the funeral stressed that he had saved Jewish and Arab lives, drawing no distinction when providing treatment.

Staff at the hospital, who knew his value most of all, pointed out that the doctor had flown back only hours earlier from the United States, where he had been giving lectures to hospital staff on handling the heavy influxes of casualties that can follow suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism, and a talk at a New York University conference marking the second anniversary of the September 11th attacks.

Mr Yonatan Halevy, director of Sha'are Zedek, told reporters: "The fact that a man flies, three days before his daughter's wedding, to share this doctrine about preparing for a mass terror attack, which Jerusalem hospitals have unprecedented knowledge of, is an example of his combined outlook - complete dedication to both work and the family."

Amid the tearful ranks of relatives and friends at the cemetery, Mr Simon Spiro, Nava's grandfather, noted that she had chosen to do her National Service working with infirm children, and wailed from beside the two fresh graves: "Can there be a greater tragedy? All of you have to grow up now very quickly," he said to Nava's five surviving siblings. "There's no more time for childish things."