Ongoing Missile Attacks Produce an Exodus, Some Bizarre Stories

The exodus from Tel Aviv goes on as Iraqi missiles continue to rain down on the metropolitan area.

Every evening, tens of thousands of Tel Aviv residents jam the exits from the city to get out of Scud range in the evening hours, when most of the Iraqi missile attacks have occurred.

By late afternoon, thousands of cars clog the roads and highways out of Tel Aviv. Most of them, crawling northward bumper-to-bumper as dusk falls, seem to contain just the driver, usually male.

Many men must still work here everyday but have temporarily moved their families to Jerusalem or other safe havens.

Tel Aviv Mayor Shlomo Lahat, a former Israel Defense Force general, has generated controversy in recent days by branding people who flee the city “deserters.”

“I was not talking about families with young children,” Lahat explained Monday to a delegation of American Jewish leaders whom he took on a tour of badly damaged neighborhoods.

“My main problem is with older families whose children are grown. People who leave their city will also leave their country. What we need now is more self-control and a sense of duty to our country,” he told members of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

The Scud attacks have produced some bizarre tales.

One newspaper reported Monday about a man who underwent surgery before the U.N.-imposed Jan. 15 deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. American and allied forces started their air assault on Iraq on Jan. 17 and the first Scud missile fell on Tel Aviv the following day.

PATIENT THOUGHT HE WAS DEAD

The surgical patient did not regain consciousness for over a week. When he came to, it was in the middle of an air raid alert. The patient saw what seemed to be devils who looked like ants, and he concluded he was dead.

The man was not hallucinating. The doctors and nurses attending him wore gas masks, which made them resemble arthropods. When they saw his bewilderment, they removed the masks to reassure him.

But the patient reportedly fainted from shock when the doctor said his father and mother were waiting outside to see him. The man’s mother had died five years earlier, and he was now surely convinced he was dead, the newspaper reported.

As it turned out, the doctor had been only slightly mistaken. The woman waiting with the patient’s father was the man’s second wife.

Another story making the rounds is of a family that was taping their favorite television show, “The Cosbys,” when an air raid alert sent them scurrying into their gas-proof room.

After the “all clear,” they resumed watching the show, this time on videotape. When it came to the point where it was interrupted by the air raid alert, the family forgot they were watching a recording and went back to the sealed room.

According to the newspaper story, they sat there for an hour wondering why no “all clear” was broadcast on their transistor radio.