Israelis Awaken to Harsh Impact of Iraqi Missiles

There had been a false sense of security throughout much of Israel on Thursday, prompted by initial reports that U.S. warplanes had knocked out the Iraqi missile launchers that threatened Israel.

And then, early this morning, Saddam Hussein’s missiles came.

Residents of this city’s impoverished Ezra neighborhood awoke to the brutal impact of an Iraqi Scud missile within yards of their homes. It was but one of several to strike their country.

Those who ventured outside found an immense pit--60 feet across and 20 feet deep--surrounded by about 100 yards of rubble.

Houses nearby were stripped to their frames, littered with the debris of mangled furnishings. Cars were crushed. Shards of glass and splintered shutters littered the streets.

Some of the residents were injured; all of them were stunned. But amazingly, despite the force of the explosion, none of them died.

“My whole house fell on me,” Tamar Shteiner said, her voice trembling. “There was no alarm. I just woke up and found myself flying.”

She said her newborn baby was sheltered from the blast by its crib.

Amnon Sumbul, whose house had all its windows blown out, noted that this particular missile of Hussein had landed on one of Tel Aviv’s poorest neighborhoods.

“We’re abandoned by everyone anyway,” he said. “Now they’re shelling us, too.”

With the people of Israel on emergency alert and ordered to remain at home, the streets of Tel Aviv were deserted at dawn today. Only the residents of the bombed neighborhood strayed outside to survey the damage in stunned disbelief. Because of fears that Hussein might have tipped his missile with chemical warheads, some wore gas masks.

Although most Israelis had appeared confident earlier that their nation was safe from Hussein’s threats of a missile bombardment in retaliation for the American-led attack on Iraq, Morris Rogev, a retired Israeli forensic specialist, said his family was not so sanguine.

“We knew it would happen,” Rogev said through a gas mask in a telephone interview with The Times from his apartment in northern Tel Aviv. “We tend to believe what people say. If he says he’s going to throw bombs at you, we believe it. . . .

“I’m mad as hell,” said Rogev, 60. “But what can I do about it?”

Rogev, who once served as a British army officer in East Africa, said he was awakened by sirens shortly after 2 a.m. Tel Aviv time.

“I said, ‘That bastard’s done it.’

“I think it (one of the missiles) fell not very far from us,” he said. “We heard booms. Rain was falling.”

Rogev said he and his wife, Gavrialla, and a son stayed in a sealed bedroom. He was dismayed to have forgotten a television set but was monitoring a radio.

The family dog was with them. “She doesn’t have a gas mask,” Rogev said. “We sedated her, and she is sleeping quietly on the bed.”

As the hours passed and dawn approached, Sara Kor, 60, who lives in an apartment near the center of the city, realized the attack was over, for now.

Asked in a telephone interview if she had been frightened, she said she wasn’t, but “most people were . . . .

“After all,” she said, “it’s not the biggest pleasure to know that something (like that) could happen.”

On the other hand, the 60-year-old woman said, “We have come through difficult times. We are in our own country, and we can defend ourselves. I’m sure the government will find a way.”

As with the attack on Baghdad the night before, it was largely left to television and radio correspondents to paint for America the first spare images of a foreign city as it came under attack.

“I was reading an article on how war might go,” Cable News Network correspondent Richard Roth reported from Tel Aviv. “Calm waves lapping on beach. I hear a siren and think it’s a false alarm.”

Seconds later, he said, blasts shook the city. Suddenly, the nature of the new war seemed drastically changed.

“There were three large explosions, clearly audible in the northern section of Tel Aviv, where I am now,” Peter Allen Frost, an ABC radio correspondent, reported to ABC-TV anchor Peter Jennings from one of the network newsrooms in Israel.

The initial shocks were followed by “another few explosions or echoes,” Frost continued. “We have reports of three explosions in the southern Tel Aviv region, one of them very close to the ABC news bureau there.”

Martin Fletcher, an NBC television correspondent in Tel Aviv, reported that “one large building has collapsed (after being hit by a missile). . . .”

“It’s not known whether the building is residential or commercial,” Fletcher said. “There were victims (rescued from the building), suggesting it was residential.”

Subsequent announcements indicated that contrary to initial reports, there were no chemical warheads on the missiles.

But concerns that Hussein might employ such weapons had prompted Israeli officials to distribute gas masks and order residents to retreat to sealed rooms in the event of a possible gas attack.

In accordance with such instructions, the news people donned gas masks, straining to make their voices heard through the canister filters on their mouthpieces. All entrances and windows in the newsrooms were sealed, effectively blotting out the sounds of the exploding warheads.

CNN reporter Linda Scherzer was one of those prepared to head out into the streets in search of information about the attack.

“We can keep our masks on for several hours before changing canisters,” she told viewers before leaving the room.

James Blackwell, a CNN military analyst back in the United States, responded: “Linda, you are a very good soldier.”

Zubin Mehta, a former director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic who now serves as music director of the Israel Philharmonic, joined others donning the protective gear in the bomb shelter of the Tel Aviv Hilton.

“There have been exercises putting on and off the masks,” he told a CNN reporter. “The entire country is bent on discipline.”

It was all part of a concerted effort to keep casualties at a minimum.

Times staff writers Edward J. Boyer, John Hurst, Eric Malnic, Carol McGraw, Richard E. Meyer, Patt Morrison and Ronald L. Soble in Los Angeles contributed to this story.