Israel Builds Massive Civil Defense System to Weather an Iraqi Attack : Chemical war: Volunteers, gas masks, ‘safe rooms’ in homes are all part of steps to prepare for an assault.

Paulina Gessler helped wheel one last shivering soldier through the decontamination showers, then pulled off her gas mask and smiled--a 10th-grader spending the school day nonchalantly practicing her role in the city’s defenses against deadly gases.

“Even if it happens, it’s nothing terrible--we’re ready,” she said, watching as dozens of mock-wounded soldiers, half-naked and streaked with curative powder, were treated by the hundreds of scurrying medics of central Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital.

Multiply volunteers like Gessler and the Ichilov emergency teams by thousands, add an undisclosed number of special army civil defense troops, almost 4 million gas mask kits and many miles of tape sealing off “safe rooms” in private homes, and the sum is what Israeli officials call the most elaborate civil defense network against chemical attack the world has ever seen.

Israeli military officials insist that despite Iraqi threats, the danger of a chemical attack is minimal, and it would probably affect only a tiny percentage of the population if it came.

But that has not prevented civil defense officials from launching a preparation campaign stunning in its scope.

It is nearly impossible to find an Israeli who has not picked up his “protection kit,” consisting of a gas mask, an atropine shot to strengthen the body’s defenses against nerve gas, gauze pads and a special powder to relieve the effects of irritant gases on skin.

And in response to a massive information campaign, the vast majority of the population has bought tape and plastic sheeting and prepared to seal off one room in their homes from harmful gases outside in case of attack.

In Jerusalem, considered an unlikely target for Iraqi missiles, businesswoman Israela Goldblum gave a matter-of-fact tour Tuesday of the attic room she had prepared for herself and her 9-year-old daughter, Maya, in accordance with official instructions.

She had taped over the gaps in the window frames and cracks in the wooden ceiling and hung plastic sheets across the windows to catch the glass if it is blown in. She had even taped over the keyhole in the attic door.

On a shelf stood a battery-powered radio for catching the critical broadcasts that will tell her what to do next, along with bottled water, candles and gas mask kits.

“It all seems ridiculous,” she said. “In statistics, it’s the same kind of probability as being touched by terrorist activity or a car accident.”

But nonetheless, she said, “People who laughed at (the advice to seal up a room) at first did it yesterday, and those who resisted longest did it this morning.”

Dr. Dan Michaeli, director of Ichilov Hospital, said that Israel has the world’s best chemical defense program, “starting with prevention on the individual level and on the institutional level and going on to the system of evacuation and preparation of medical centers.”

Along with distributing gas masks, the Israeli government has built large open-air shower systems at virtually all the country’s hospitals to prevent chemical agents from contaminating the wards and stocked up on the drugs that victims of chemical warfare need most.

In all, Health Minister Ehud Olmert said, it has cost “tens of millions of dollars just to prepare for this specific threat.”

Residents of London and other European cities were given gas masks during World War II, and Iran did what it could to defend against Iraqi gas attacks in recent years, but the Israeli system has modernized civil defense, according to military sources.

The Israeli system of distributing chemical defense kits is meant to last “for eternity,” a military official said. It is so computerized that Israeli children can expect to get a postcard saying: “Happy Birthday, you’ve now reached the age of 8. You’ll have to come in with your parents to switch your kit” from a child-size mask and atropine shot to bigger ones.

“Or it will be ‘Happy New Year. Your atropine shot has expired,’ ” Olmert said.

At Ichilov Hospital, the drill was so elaborate that it even included volunteers pretending to be traumatized relatives needing emergency psychological help after identifying photographs of their loved ones as among the chemically wounded or dead.

For all its wide-scale organization, however, the Israeli chemical defense program still appeared to suffer from many a loose end.

Israeli radio airwaves have been dominated the last two days by anxious questions from callers who are unsure how to use the kits, or had opened them prematurely.

In one uniquely Israeli problem, the government found that it had not bought enough gas masks for men who wear beards--as is the practice of many Orthodox Jews--and a special rabbinical ruling had to be issued authorizing religious Jews to shave if the need to don a mask arises.

In a far more serious issue, civil defense officials initially refused to distribute gas mask kits to residents of the occupied territories, saying that they did not have to worry that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who portrays himself as a champion of the Palestinian cause, would aim his weapons there.

But Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip demanded the kits, and then a Palestinian resident of Bethlehem won an Israeli Supreme Court ruling saying that the Palestinians in the occupied territories have an equal right to protection.