Some Israelis Going Underground to Seek Shelter From Scud Attacks

Deep underground, at the heart of a winding labyrinth of concrete ramps and narrow staircases, a small band of Tel Aviv residents who could not bear living under the threat of missile attacks has found a place where they can feel truly safe.

They have laid out their mattresses and set up their tents in the cement nooks and crannies of the bomb shelter beneath Tel Aviv’s still-unfinished central bus station. And they have no intention of giving up their secure space until the war is over.

“I don’t want to die for nothing,” said painter Rachmiel Shmilovich, whose house had all its windows blown out when an Iraqi missile landed nearby. “I’d rather stay here than die like a fool in my house.”

Most of the 30 or so nocturnal residents of the shelter work during the day. They are not homeless, although they have a certain wild-eyed intensity reminiscent of some street people. They are simply convinced that their houses are not safe to sleep in as long as Iraq is still launching missiles at Israel.

“I’m staying here until I feel like I can walk freely in the streets,” said Ori Moskonah, a burly, bearded man with a diamond in one ear and normally a bouncer in a Tel Aviv club. “Call me a coward. I’m afraid.”

The shelter--a Spartan warren of several hotel-sized rooms--is hard to find. It is reachable only by a disorienting search through the silent station, past ceilings still sprouting uncovered steel bars and floors still nothing more than small lots of sand.

But its inaccessibility has not kept it from appearing on Israeli television and in the press as a symbol of the search for safety.

The fear that the shelter-dwellers express so openly speaks to the deep anxiety that other Israelis still feel but must increasingly suppress as they struggle to return to some kind of normal life, sending their children back to school and returning to Tel Aviv and Haifa from areas outside the target range.

And politically, the shelter crowd represents part of a small but increasingly public outcry from Israelis who question the government’s civil defense instructions, which require people to enter sealed rooms in their homes during a missile attack instead of going to underground bomb shelters.

Because all the attacks so far have involved conventional, rather than chemical, warheads, many people argue that the best protection is below ground.

Shmilovich said he decided to spend nights in the shelter after seeing the windows of his house blown out. He decided, he said, that even if a missile carries a chemical warhead, the government-prescribed sealed room will offer him no protection whatsoever because the blast will blow open the room and the gas will get in anyway.

In the bus station shelter, reputed to be bombproof even against an atomic blast, at least he feels half safe. “They offered me a hotel, but I came here,” he said. “Here, at least I have half comfort.”

Under the headline, “We Decided ‘To Hell With the Civil Defense Instructions, We’re Going Straight to the Shelter,’ ” the Israeli daily newspaper Hadashot reported Sunday on several Tel Aviv residents who have decided to go to their basement shelters instead of their sealed rooms.

“We came home with the decision that every ‘poison snake’ (the code words that come over the radio during an air alert) will send us flying to the shelter,” computer expert Eren Yaro told Hadashot.

Military officials maintain that keeping people in their own homes is the best policy, although they have taken to talking less about the protection that a sealed room can offer.

There is not enough room for all Israelis in underground shelters--which are common features in many public buildings like the bus station--and keeping people spread out, in their apartments, reduces the chances of major casualties. Concentrating them in shelters is like “putting all your eggs in one basket,” Israeli army spokesman Raanan Gissin said.

Still, civil defense officials did announce a small change in policy Sunday night, telling Israelis with field shelters in their homes that, if they can reach them within two minutes of an alert, they should use them; otherwise, the government policy that citizens head for sealed rooms remains in effect.

As for the bus shelter folk, the contradiction between their personal choice and the official civil defense regulations has put city authorities in an awkward spot. Officials have not risked the fallout of forbidding people from spending nights at the bus station shelter; a friendly watchman opens the iron gate to the station complex for all who ask.

“There’s no choice,” the watchman said, adding that over the weekend the number of visitors swelled in reaction to an Iraqi Scud missile attack Friday night that broke a six-day streak of calm, and, Israeli officials said, wounded at least 20 people and damaged 500 apartments nearby.

But a sign at the gate warns that “staying in the shelter is not recommended,” and visitors enter at their own risk. Those in the shelter said authorities frequently resort to threats to get them to leave.

Still, they stay, bedding down early at night on the hard concrete slab, under harsh fluorescent lights, with no kitchen at hand, a working bathroom several flights of stairs away and no television--but also no worries about being jarred awake by the awful whine of the air raid siren.

“That first time, I thought it was the end of the world,” printer Victor Lalouche said with a grimace. “That siren is like hell. Here, we only hear it on the radio, if we want.”

The shelter-dwellers, most of them lone men but with a sprinkling of women and children, had no complaints about the bare floors and walls, or the spider webs hanging from the ceilings. “It’s comfortable spiritually,” Shmilovich said.

At its high point about two weeks ago, the shelter housed more than 200 people at night, residents said. Now, its population has shrunk to only the hard core.

But, Moskonah said, with many of the city’s clubs and restaurants still closed, “This is the most in place in Tel Aviv.”