‘I’ve Never Seen Them Get Out of Bed So Fast’ : Tel Aviv: Mother recounts a night of terror that began when the siren signaled incoming missiles.

When the siren went off early today in a Tel Aviv suburb, Esther Tallen-Gozani knew it was not a drill.

“I leapt out of bed and shouted to the children to get up,” she said. “I’ve never seen them get out of bed so fast.”

It was only a matter of minutes before Tallen-Gozani and her three children, ages 4 to 15, were in the small bedroom they had made into a shelter by sealing the windows with plastic and stocking it with bottled water.

They quickly put their gas masks on--the older children had practiced at school--and taped the door closed.

“My hands were trembling as I put up the tape,” Tallen-Gozani said in a telephone interview from the sealed room. “We just didn’t know what to expect.”

She said it took a while for the family to adjust to the masks. She and her son Sam, 13, at first felt as if they were suffocating, but both calmed down as they sat quietly and listened to the silence outside.

Then came what she described as “two soft booms, like a whop. . . . A little after that there was the third one, and the floor shook.”

What she heard from her shelter in Ramat Aviv, north of Tel Aviv, was some of the several missiles fired from Iraq.

It was hours before the army announced that none of the missiles carried chemical warheads. Tallen-Gozani said no one in her family was injured, but she did not know if there was damage outside near the family’s home.

She said she and her children sat helplessly, hoping for information from the radio.

“There was nothing we could do,” she said. “We sat there.”

The family was relieved when Israel radio announced about 4 a.m., two hours after the sirens went off, that citizens could remove their masks. They were told to stay in their sealed rooms, however.

Tallen-Gozani, a native of Tiburon, Calif., tried to call her family in the United States, but the international circuits were busy. She finally reached her sister, Louise, in Long Beach, Calif.

“She sounded as if she were pale, like us,” Tallen-Gozani said. “She had been watching television and had tried calling but couldn’t get through either.”

Tallen-Gozani also talked with her husband, Ohad, a night editor on the foreign desk of the Hebrew paper Maariv. He was at work when the sirens went off.

A resident of Israel since 1974, Tallen-Gozani said she had mixed emotions about the missile attack.

“Right now I don’t feel much anger, mainly relief,” she said. “Yes, I think Israel should retaliate. But I am looking to the United States, not Israel, to end this, and I hope the Americans manage to put an end to it.”