More Missiles Hit Israel : Tel Aviv Rocked by Blasts on the Sabbath : War: Daylight attack comes after three false alarms during the night. At least four blasts were heard in the city.

Several missiles hit Tel Aviv in a daylight barrage Saturday, the Israeli army command said. Residents reported hearing up to 10 explosions, and Israeli jets scrambled.

Initial police reports said there were at least five hits, immediately after an air alarm at 7:20 a.m. on the Jewish Sabbath.

The army spokesman, Brig. Gen. Nachman Shai, urged citizens to put on gas masks and rush to sealed rooms as protection against an Iraqi chemical attack. But just before 8 a.m., Shai said residents in northern and southern Israel could remove their gas masks. That left a densely populated coastal area of about 50 miles long between Hadera and Ashkelon.

The missiles hit after a night of false alarms and a day after Iraqi Scud missiles had landed in Tel Aviv and Haifa, slightly injuring 12 people. Whether the latest attack had injured or killed anyone was not known.

Immediately after Saturday’s explosions, the roar of jets was heard over Tel Aviv.

President Bush was awakened at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland by his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, said White House spokeswoman Laura Melillo. Bush had no immediate comment.

Overnight, air raid sirens had blared three times, all of them false alarms.

After the attack Friday, Israeli officials had refrained from retaliating at the urging of the United States, which fears that Israel’s entrance into the war could fracture the coalition. However, Israel claimed the right to attack.

Defense Minister Moshe Arens had pledged Friday that Israel would do something. “We have said publicly and to the Americans that if we were attacked, we would react,” he told Israeli television. “We were attacked. . . . We will react, certainly. . . . You will, of course, not expect me to state the date.”

Earlier, American and allied warplanes shrieked across the desert, pounding Iraqis at more than a sortie a minute, and President Bush vowed to find and destroy mobile Scud missiles terrorizing Israel from hiding places in the sand.

Sounding somber, the commander of U.S. forces warned that driving Iraq out of Kuwait will be “a long, hard task.”

Just how hard was illustrated later Saturday, when Iraq issued a desperate appeal for Muslims to attack U.S. and allied interests around the world immediately.

A statement on Baghdad Radio urged Muslims to attack the “interests, facilities, symbols and figures” of the United States, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, the followers of the emir of Kuwait and their allies. There is no time for delay, the broadcast said.

Three more U.S. warplanes were lost in raids against Iraqi targets and their crews were missing, the Pentagon said. That brought to eight the number of allied planes lost; four of them are American.

The Baghdad government claimed it had captured American pilots and would later produce them. But Lt. Gen. Tom Kelly told reporters at the Pentagon that “we know of no American prisoners of war.” Among crew members of the four U.S. jets lost in action, Kelly said, seven are missing.

“They all went down behind enemy lines,” Kelly said.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney declared an “airlift emergency” and ordered 20 commercial airlines to provide up to 181 aircraft to help ferry U.S. war supplies and equipment to the Middle East.

Meanwhile, Lt. Gen. Chuck Horner, the U.S. Air Force commander in the gulf, predicted a “very strenuous campaign” to take control of the skies over Iraq and Kuwait.

In Washington, Pentagon officials revealed that Iraqi air power has not, in fact, been crippled by the first two days of allied bombing. They said only about 10 Iraqi planes had been destroyed or damaged--and that the remainder of the 700-plane Iraqi air force had dispersed or might be lurking in concrete bunkers.

Moreover, about 30 mobile Scud missile launchers survived the initial air attacks. It was those launchers, secreted in the desert, that Iraq used to strike Tel Aviv, Haifa and other parts of Israel.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had repeatedly threatened Israel before the war began and carried out his threats in an attempt to fracture the U.S.-led coalition.

If Israel is drawn into the war, the U.S. could lose its Arab allies, such as Egypt and Syria.

At a news conference at the White House Friday, Bush praised the Israeli restraint and pledged “the darndest search and destroy mission that’s ever been undertaken” to wipe out all of the Iraqi Scuds.

Low cloud cover slowed air operations Friday.

Up on the sand-and-gravel plains of northern Saudi Arabia, ground forces of the U.S.-led coalition wheeled and maneuvered close to the Kuwait and Iraq frontiers. Units were being repositioned “for further action,” the top U.S. commander said.

Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf also said more U.S. amphibious vessels, some presumably loaded with battle-ready Marines, were moving into the Persian Gulf. The U.S. Navy was already in action in gulf waters, having sunk or disabled three Iraqi patrol boats, he said.

Except for a minor artillery exchange early Thursday, no ground hostilities had occurred, the general said. But the non-stop bombardment by U.S. and allied warplanes is expected to be only a prelude to an all-out land assault by armor and infantry to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, the tiny oil emirate they have held 5 1/2 months in the face of world condemnation.

On the third day of war, looking ahead, both sides had sobering assessments.

“We must be realistic,” Bush said in Washington. “There will be losses . . . war is never cheap or easy.”

Iraq’s Defense Ministry newspaper dismissed the “unsuccessful” U.S. air attacks and said Baghdad had decided on “a long-term war that will bleed the Americans and their allies.”

Allied air raids hit strategic targets in Baghdad with pinpoint accuracy, including the Defense Ministry, said Western journalists who left the city and arrived in Jordan Friday. They said the war also raged in the countryside, where they saw bombing raids, Iraqi mobile missiles on the move, and Iraqi aircraft fleeing from attackers.

The Iraqis reported 23 civilians killed in the first waves of air attackers Thursday. The government did not report on military casualties, and further civilian reports were not available.

In Israel, air raid sirens had sounded in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem late Friday night and early Saturday. The sirens sent Israelis back into sealed rooms they had prepared in their upstairs quarters--poison gas settles to the ground. They put gas masks back on--but then they took them off when an all-clear sounded.

The Israeli military said it had gotten indications that an Iraqi missile would be fired, but none was.

The Israelis have no defense against Iraq’s modified Scud ballistic missiles. They recently received two U.S.-made Patriot anti-missile units, but they have not been reported operational. The sophisticated Patriot system knocked out an Iraqi missile fired at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, early Friday.

At first, the Israelis were relying on Desert Storm warplanes to mop up surviving mobile Iraqi missile launchers.

Those planes demolished six mobile launchers inside Iraq on Friday and pinpointed five others for further attacks, the U.S. military said. Horner, the U.S. Air Force commander in the gulf, said the 11 launchers represented a “considerable” proportion of Iraq’s arsenal, but he also acknowledged that intelligence estimates vary on the number of launchers.

Schwarzkopf likened the hunt for the launchers, which can be hidden in shelters, to a search for “a needle in a haystack.” American air officers said the Air Force’s elusive F-117A stealth fighter-bombers would go after the “needles.”

As darkness fell Friday, the pace of takeoffs from a major base in eastern Saudi Arabia intensified, as it had the previous night. The U.S. command said Desert Storm planes were flying 2,000 sorties a day--a rate of more than one a minute.

Because of cloud cover over Iraq, more than 40 FA-18 Hornet pilots who embarked on bombing missions Friday returned to base without dropping their 500-pound bombs.

The pilots would have had to drop to dangerously low altitudes for visual identification of targets, said Marine Capt. Rocky Morrison.

“Instead of dragging a lot of people down there and getting shot up, we just turned around and came home. We’ll do it another time,” he said. “ . . . We’ll take whatever time it needs to do it.”

Horner sought to temper early suggestions that the air attacks had devastated Iraq’s antiaircraft power.

“In some areas they’re probably the most difficult air defenses assembled in the world,” he told reporters at a briefing in Saudi Arabia. He said it would be “a very strenuous campaign achieving complete control of the air.”