Business As Usual In Israel (Almost)
Israelis, who were hit by 39 Iraqi missiles during the Gulf War in 1991, continue to keep a wary eye on the war in Iraq.
They walk around with cardboard boxes holding their gas masks, but they're remaining calm, reports CBS News Correspondent Robert Berger. After all, it's just another day in the neighborhood — the Middle East neighborhood.
"I go about my daily life and I am not worried about the risk of war," said David Stern, who immigrated to Israel from Los Angeles. "One faces the things that one encounters in life."
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon urged Israelis to stick to their routines. "Send the kids to school and nursery school and go to your workplaces, go on with life as usual," he said.
Israeli kids are carrying those cardboard boxes to school, too.
"What's inside?" Berger asked one student.
"A gas mask, a filter and a shot," replied sixth-grader Shirel Mordecai.
The shot is atropine, an antidote for poison gas. In the U.S., there fire drills, but in Israel, it's chemical warfare drills.
"We went really fast down the stairs, went in the shelter, put on our gas masks for a few minutes then took them off, talked, then went back upstairs to class," she said.
So far, no Iraqi missiles have fallen here, and chances are improving that Israel will stay out of the war.
"We think that in all likelihood nothing will happen here in Israel," said chief Army spokeswoman General Ruth Yaron, but added authorities cannot take chances "and we are ready for any kind of scenario and any eventuality."
Israeli warplanes continue to patrol the skies 24-hours a day ... just in case.
Several thousand Israelis in the Tel Aviv area, a target of Iraqi Scuds in 1991, fled to safer parts of the country such as Jerusalem, unlikely to be hit because of its holy sites, or Eilat, far out of range at Israel's southern tip.
Israel's Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau urged those Jews who observe the Sabbath to keep their radios on and carry their gas masks to synagogue, as the Home Front Command has recommended. In matters of life and death, Orthodox Jews are permitted to carry on Shabbat and listen to emergency radio broadcasts, Lau told Israel Radio.
Israel has set up a radio channel that could be switched on before the Friday evening start of the holy day and would broadcast nothing except for a warning in case of attack.
Lau also asked couples not to cancel weddings unless left with no other choice. Marriage fulfills a religious commandment, and under Jewish law, weddings are not to be canceled except in extreme circumstances.
On Thursday, the threat of war wasn't enough to stop relatives and friends of Leonardo and Andrea Strakman from arriving from Argentina for the couple's wedding just north of Tel Aviv.
The visitors bought gas masks at Israel's Ben Gurion airport and toted them off to the wedding, piling the shoe box-sized kits in a corner of a wedding hall near Tel Aviv Thursday night.
Meanwhile, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza demonstrated against the war in Iraq and hoarded food in case Israel imposes an extended curfew during the fighting.
Hundreds marched in support of Saddam Hussein in two rallies in Gaza on Thursday. In Gaza City, a Palestinian Cabinet minister, Abdel Aziz Shaheen, told a crowd of about 1,500, "This is a war against all Arabs and Muslims."
In the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, about 700 Palestinians, most of them schoolchildren, waved Iraqi flags and posters of Saddam and burned two U.S. flags. They shouted "Death to America, death to Bush!" and "We will sacrifice our soul and our blood for Saddam!"
Palestinians who hoarded supplies cited an Israeli curfew that confined them to their homes for all seven weeks of the 1991 Gulf War. Evening and nighttime curfews have already been in place in many Palestinians towns since the summer, when Israeli forces began searching for Palestinian militants.
Sharon strongly endorsed the U.S.-led offensive against Saddam. In a statement directed at President Bush, Sharon said: "Your war is the war of the free world ... against the black forces of wickedness that act in only one way — that of terror."