As night fell at the Givat Shaul cemetery in Jerusalem, with a single torch lighting the graveside, Vladimir Korganov laid his 20-year-old son Yuri to rest. A headstone close by marked the final resting place of Yuri's mother, Isabella, who died of cancer last year.
As the mourning prayers were recited, his grandmother, Paulina, collapsed.
"What have we done to deserve this?" another relative wailed. "He was just a boy."
Yuri Korganov, whose family immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union, was actually one of the oldest of the 11 young Israelis who were blown up by two Palestinian Hamas suicide bombers in downtown Jerusalem on December 1st. Some of the victims were as young as 14.
A day later, in Haifa, 15 more civilians were killed by another Hamas bomber aboard a bus. Together with two other failed attacks, in which only the bombers were killed, and a series of shootings that have killed six more Israelis in recent days, that makes December 2001 the bloodiest month in Israel since the spring of 1996, when four suicide bombings in eight days killed 60 Israelis. And this upsurge, of course, has been the key factor in the new calls from the US and EU for the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat, to crack down, seriously, on the extremists.
Israeli politicians are agonising about how to confront the escalation: a minority believe international pressure may yet prompt Mr Arafat into taking firmer action; a majority believe he will never now prove a viable peace partner, having last year rejected the previous Israeli government's offer to relinquish all of the Gaza Strip and almost all of the West Bank and share control of Jerusalem.
Palestinian leaders, by contrast, assert that Israel bears the ultimate blame for such attacks, since, they say, it is radicalising the Palestinian population by maintaining the occupation, expanding settlements and using the "pretext" of security to impose blockades on West Bank cities. But the warring politicians' recriminations are irrelevant to the broken friends and families of the victims, struggling to come to terms with the loss, in a vicious split-second explosion, of their loved ones.
Every futile death comes with its own heart-wrenching story, many of which have prominently featured in Israel's newspapers these past few days. Yossi Mizrachi was out eating pizza in central Jerusalem with three of his friends - Avihu, Nir and Moshe - on that fateful December Saturday night. They were standing outside a record store when the first bomber detonated his explosives - a deadly cocktail that also included nuts, bolts and, horrifyingly, rat poison. "I was blown over by the force of the blast," Yossi recounted from his hospital bed, recovering from minor injuries. "And I heard Moshe call out to me: 'Are you all right?'" Then came a second blast, as the second bomber detonated his explosives. Said Yossi: "I didn't hear anything more from Moshe after that."
Indeed, Moshe Yedid-Levy and Nir Haftsadi were both dead.
Avi Mizrachi (no relation to Yossi) thought that his closest friend, his twin brother Eran, had been killed as well in the attack - which came as they celebrated their 16th birthday at a downtown cafΘ. Their parents, Sima and Rafi, knew exactly where the boys were and, fearing the worst, telephoned the various Jerusalem hospitals. They found Avi soon enough - being treated for minor injuries. But of Eran there was no word. Now they went to each hospital in turn until, finally, when standing in the Emergency Ward at Hadassah Hospital, they dialled Eren's mobile phone for the umpteenth time, and heard it ringing, faintly, in the distance. Eran had been unable to answer because he was in a coma, kept alive by respirator, having been critically injured. His family still doesn't know if he will recover; doctors are talking fearfully about possible brain damage. Their hopes have been raised, but only slightly, by the fact that, a few days ago, he uttered his first word since the blast: "Mummy." Israeli doctors, battered by the seemingly interminable series of bombings, note that those who are injured may never really recover psychologically, even if they do physically. The Cohen family is a case in point.
Five years ago, Hanan Cohen was one of the "lucky" ones - badly injured by the Hamas bomber who blew up a No. 18 bus on Jerusalem's Jaffa road. In the latest Jerusalem blast, his brother, Erez (23), was injured as well - but Hanan has not come to hospital to visit. "Hanan was hospitalised for a year and a half " after the 1996 bombing, Erez explained. Added their father, Yosef: "If Hanan comes back into a hospital now, and sees the same scenes, all the years of counselling will go down the drain."
Yosef Cohen, his wife, Hanan and three other children, formerly secular Jews, have become Orthodox since the 1996 attack. "I can't protect my children," Yosef explained helplessly. But Erez is refusing to follow suit. "No one can protect us," he rationalised. "Nowhere is safe."
The victims of these Arab attacks are not all Jews, of course. Many of those killed in the December 2nd Haifa blast were Arabs. The bomber struck in a mixed - and harmonious - Jewish-Arab neighbourhood.
And many of those traumatised by past attacks are Arabs too, like Husam Abu-Hussein and his daughter Tra'a, who were severely burned in a car-bomb attack in the central town of Hadera last year. "Every new attack takes me back to those terrible moments," recalled Husam, who has never returned to work. "And my baby girl, she has nightmares. She doesn't go to kindergarten."
Yet Israel's civilian population is proving extraordinarily resilient in the face of the violence - perhaps, analysts speculate, because there is so widespread a sense, however disputed by the Palestinians, that this intifada conflict is something Israel made every diplomatic effort to avoid, and thus that Israel has no choice but to stand firm. That resilience was underlined when the owners of the Sbarro pizzeria, blown up in a suicide attack that killed 15 in August, defiantly reopened its doors a month later - and reported an increase in business, from customers anxious to show that they would not be deterred.
Moshe Abergil, owner of the Drugstore 2000 store in the newly- bombed central Jerusalem area, displayed similar determination last week. "I'm not going to close down because of a suicide bomber," he insisted.
The resilience is born of an absence of alternatives in many cases, and a certain amount of fatalism. As he took leave of his son Yuri at the cemetery last week, Vladimir Korganov murmured quietly: "Now I have no reason to flee from here. I'm the only one left."