Suicide Bomb Survivors Face Worlds Blown Apart

"As time goes by, the support and help gets less and less," said Mally Nissim, whose 16-year-old daughter, Adi Huja, was badly injured in the suicide bombing of Jerusalem's Cafe Rimon on Dec. 1, 2001. "The whole situation has been going on for two years. My heart is ripped up. I can hardly take it. The atmosphere at home is bad. Everybody is irritable and yelling. Tempers are raised."

She added: "When I hear about an attack, I feel sorry for the injured. It tears families apart."

Adi is a beautiful girl with light hair and olive skin. The only evidence of the severity of her wounds is that she walks with a crutch.

Seated on the living room couch, she pulls off her thick-soled sneakers and rolls up the legs of her khaki trousers to show what is left of her mangled legs. Both are riddled with wounds from ankle to hip -- huge craters, small holes, discolored black.

Her right foot stays in one position; the ankle was filled with screws. In all, 100 pieces of metal sliced through her body, mostly screws and bolts. Some of her wounds became infected by rat poison packed in the bomb, doctors told her.

Adi has endured 26 operations, and she will have more. She was hospitalized for half a year and in a wheelchair for one year. There are still seven or eight bolts in her body.

"The doctors said I'll be able to walk and run," she said, "but it will take time."

Adi and her mother are full of praise for the doctors who saved Adi's legs. For the bombers, there is only hate.

"I hate them and their entire families," Adi said bitterly, "and I wish them to go through exactly what I went through. They have no heart."

The Weapons Instructor

In a bed at a rehabilitation center outside Tel Aviv, American-born Steve Averbach, 37, counts the sum total of his progress since a suicide bomber on Jerusalem's No. 6 bus shattered his world eight months ago.

He can wiggle his toes a little, and he can flex his left foot. He can move his left thumb and index finger. There is a little movement in his left elbow, and there's some sensation in the hand. That is all, but that is progress for a man who was told he would likely never move his limbs again, after a ball bearing from the bomber's explosive vest hit his spinal cord and lodged in the back of his neck.

Before the bombing, Averbach, who moved to Israel from New Jersey at age 18, was a healthy, high-powered, active man, the father of four children. He was known as "Steve Guns" to many Israelis because of his role as the premier weapons instructor in the country.

All of Averbach's training kicked in on May 18, 2003, when he boarded the bus in the French Hill neighborhood and the driver stopped to pick up one last passenger: a man dressed in the garb of a religious Jew. "He wasn't Jewish," Averbach recalled. "He was Arabic."

Averbach immediately grabbed for his gun and spun around to fire. "I was known to be able to draw my gun in .85 of a second," he said. But the bomber already had his hand on the triggering device. "I was in mid-spin when the bomb went off," Averbach said. "It doesn't matter how fast you are -- the guy with his finger on the trigger is going to win." Averbach's gun never cleared his holster.