Tel Aviv Tells of ‘Miracle’ Survival, Then Girds for More Iraqi Missiles : Israel: The city is amazed more damage wasn’t done. But, one official says, ‘This could be only the beginning.’

Leora Pascar sat peacefully on the lawn in Friday’s bright sunshine, watching army experts on the roof of her apartment house carefully remove the battered engine of an Iraqi missile that had plummeted through the ceiling into her children’s bedroom the night before.

“It was a miracle that the children were sleeping on the other side of the room,” the slim, bespectacled lawyer said. “Their little tables and chairs were crushed. You can just imagine what would have happened if their heads were there.”

Other amazing stories of survival on the day after eight Scud missiles landed in the Tel Aviv and Haifa areas buoyed the residents of this suddenly embattled city but could not sweeten the prospect of spending another night, perhaps many more nights, like the last one--keeping a sleepless vigil in rooms sealed against poison gas, peering at each other through the plastic eyeholes of gas masks.

And a false alarm at 9 p.m. Friday, one of several, did not help the public mood. At the Tel Aviv Hilton Hotel, guests and staff remained orderly if far from calm during the first false alarm as they filed into the corridors of the sealed-off sixth floor.

After the 15-minute alarm was over, an Israeli security guard complained: “I wish this stuff would end already. Is this living?”

Esther Yemeni, who was awakened in her home of 30 years in Tel Aviv’s Ezra neighborhood Thursday night when a missile landed virtually in her front yard, said she feared that “tonight will bring something even more terrible.”

The front of the Yemenis’ house was blown off by the Scud missile’s impact in the vacant lot facing it. But the fact that it landed in the lot instead of one of the tightly packed neighborhoods surrounding it was one of the most striking of the strokes of good fortune that left Israel without direct casualties from the missiles despite the dense population in the urban areas where they hit.

“It’s hard to believe houses and cars can be hurt like this and people not hurt,” Tel Aviv’s deputy mayor, Mordechai Yitzhari, said at the site of the Ezra hit, where bulldozers were filling in the 20-foot-deep crater that the missile had left. But little of the surrounding wreckage had been removed.

“You have to admit there are powers higher than humans,” Yitzhari said.

City officials moved more than 100 Ezra residents to a hotel Friday, some whose homes were uninhabitable but also those who appeared to need moral support after the trauma of the sudden impact that shattered their windows, swept away their shutters and left cracks and gaping holes in their walls and ceilings.

Student volunteers brought tape and plastic sheeting to the neighborhood to help reseal houses in preparation for another attack that might yet carry chemical agents.

Yitzhari said he was worried that Friday morning’s attack might have been a mere targeting exercise by the Iraqi army and that the real bombardment was yet to come.

“I believe we have to prepare very well,” he said. “This could be only the beginning. The Iraqi goal is far beyond this.”

Despite the undiminished threat from Iraq, however, residents around the Ezra blast and in Pascar’s northern Tel Aviv neighborhood--which was scattered with missile parts after a Scud apparently blew up in midair--did their best to live up to the Israeli reputation for feistiness.

“We’re in a good mood,” insisted Asher Amado, Pascar’s neighbor. “No one can break us.”

Nearby, in the small group of people gathered to watch the soldiers remove the missile engine for analysis, Rinah Leibel, the Pascars’ next-door neighbor, put in: “We’re a steady and well-trained people. We’ve lived in tension all our lives.”

Still, she admitted, it is times like these that challenge optimists.

During the Six-Day War in 1967, she said, “We had three children, and my husband said to me, ‘Rinah, I have to fight so that my son will not have to. And now my son is in the army. It all just repeats itself.”

As for Saddam Hussein, neighbors of the missile blast site said with equanimity, the air force was sure to take Israel’s revenge on him sooner or later.

Only Esther Yemeni, still upset and shaky outside the near-ruins of her house, cursed the Iraqi leader with vehemence.

“He should go to hell,” she said. “They should go and do this to Saddam Hussein’s house.”

Tel Aviv, normally a festive mix of tourists, urban sophisticates and merchants, remained a shadow of its normal self, with most people venturing out of doors only to buy food. Even Shuk Hacarmel, the colorful open-air market that is normally packed Friday mornings as people prepare for the Sabbath, was deserted.

Religious authorities, forced to allow the crisis to interfere with the normally sacrosanct Sabbath, announced that if an alarm were sounded today, observant Jews could turn on the radio and use the phone, both acts normally forbidden during the Sabbath’s enforced quiet.

As part of a parade of talk show guests picking over every aspect of the crisis hour after hour on Israeli television and radio, a sleep expert offered advice Friday on dealing with night after night of forced wakefulness, and Moshe Even Chen, head of the Israeli army’s behavioral science division, tried to explain the unprecedented nature of the current emotional tension in both the civil and the military sectors.

“This is an upside-down war,” he said. “The soldiers fighting on the front are all worried about the rear.”

But, he assured viewers, “This is a people used to being drafted, going to war and winning.”