After False Alarms, Tel Aviv Weathers 2nd Attack : Israel: The city was sleepless, its nerves on edge, after Friday’s first missile assault. And then the air raid sirens wailed again, this time for real.

After Friday’s terrifying missile attack, there had been three false alarms. The people of this city were sleepless, their nerves on edge.

And then, this morning, the air raid sirens wailed still again, and once again the attack was real.

“I felt and counted four blasts--two and two--almost simultaneously,” CBS correspondent Tom Fenton told viewers in the United States. “The radio said that once again they were conventional warheads. Poison gas was not used.”

Like other newspeople, Fenton, who was reporting from his newsroom near the center of the city, was unable to get much information about damage and casualties. Because of initial fears of chemical warheads, the people of the city had been ordered once again to stay indoors, and most of the information came from Israeli radio and the telephone.

“According to the radio, the focus of the attack was on the central coastal belt of Israel,” Larry Weidman, an NBC correspondent, reported.

CBS correspondent Bill McLaughlin said most of the damage in Tel Aviv was in a working-class neighborhood--”very much like yesterday’s attack. Near a gymnasium. A ball court. That sort of thing. . . .

“The area was uninhabited, an industrial area,” he said. “The people were well disciplined. Children were screaming, but that sort of thing is to be expected.”

“We did not see the missiles coming in, we just heard the explosions,” said Chris Wallace of ABC.

The initial report from Tel Aviv Mayor Shlomo Lahat was that no one was killed in the attack. Three people suffered slight wounds and the damage was not serious, he said.

Ehud Olmert, an Israeli Cabinet member telephoned by Wallace, said the new attack made retaliation by his country “almost inevitable.”

Dan Meridor, Israel’s minister of justice, agreed with Olmert. He told ABC’s Ted Koppel:

“We’ve never asked other people to fight for us. . . . This cannot go unpunished. We’ll have to pick the time and the way we do it, but this tyrant of Baghdad should know that this cannot go on forever.”

The first of the false alarms had come late Friday, the two others before dawn today. With each of them, air raid sirens wailed out their terrifying signal across the nation and Israelis had grabbed their gas masks and sought shelter.

Israel’s leaders had convened late into the night to discuss whether to bomb Iraq in retaliation for the first attack, early on Friday, which had damaged parts of Tel Aviv and Haifa and left about a dozen injured.

No one was reported killed by Friday’s missile explosions, but some deaths were believed to have resulted indirectly from the attack. According to Israeli police, three elderly women and a 3-year-old Arab girl suffocated in their gas masks during the raid. Most of the victims apparently had failed to remove a cap on the breathing canisters of their government-issued gas masks.

Dozens had become ill, authorities said, after prematurely injecting themselves with a nerve-gas antidote when there were early reports that the conventionally armed Iraqi missiles carried poison-gas warheads.

For most of the residents of this city, Friday afternoon had been a time of watching, waiting and reflecting on the damage of the night before.

Leora Pascar sat peacefully on the lawn in the 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 early Friday 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 deaths 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.

Despite the undiminished threat from Iraq, 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 the air--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.”

Late Friday, Defense Minister Moshe Arens told Israel Radio: “We have said publicly and to the Americans that if we were attacked, we would react. We were attacked.

“We will react, certainly.”

And the armed forces chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Shomron, declared: “An attack on our civilians cannot go without a response.”

But there was no confirmation of Israel’s intention from Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

At 8:45 p.m. Friday, the sirens sounded across the country and citizens took shelter, donning their gas masks. But 45 minutes later the all-clear was sounded.

An army spokesman said, “We had an alert that missiles would be fired toward Israel, but no missiles were shot.”

There were some reports that the false alarm was touched off by the sight of a Soviet rocket booster that fell from Earth orbit and burned its way through the skies over parts of the Middle East.

Two similar alarms that sounded in the early hours this morning also proved to be false.

Despite the successful air attacks on Iraqi missile sites announced Friday by American commanders in Saudi Arabia, Israeli officials warned the populace that they might face more incoming missiles and that the threat from chemical weapons, which Iraq is known to possess, still exists.

In Baghdad, Iraq confirmed that it had fired the missiles that hit Israel on Friday. State radio reported that the barrage had “hit political and economic targets in Tel Aviv, Haifa and other areas.”

“Israel has to get out of the Palestinian land and other Arabs’ land,” the broadcast said. “Let the United States hear the wailing of its daughter implanted in the heart of the Arab homeland.”

All day Friday, various political and military leaders met in Jerusalem and at the defense headquarters in Tel Aviv to determine the appropriate Israeli response to the initial attack, which consisted of eight Soviet-designed, Scud-B ballistic missiles fired from launchers in western Iraq.

The hawks in the government were reportedly calling for immediate, massive strikes against Iraq’s missile sites and even populated areas. The moderates were said to have warned that a tough response could jeopardize the American-led military coalition in the Saudi desert and Persian Gulf.

Foreign Minister David Levy said the Israeli government had been consulting with Washington, but he emphasized: “It is the right and responsibility of Israel to take measures to defend itself.

“It is our obligation to react without delay, without putting it off. We must prevent him, (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein, from endangering the lives of our population. To those who think we should be advised not to react we ask:

“Would anyone else restrain himself? Will there be no more missiles aimed at Israel? Is there not danger they would have chemical and biological warheads? Should we refrain from ensuring the safety of our children and the entire population just to show we are following the advice of others to make things easier?”