A senior Israeli official said yesterday that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon received advance warning from the US about its first strike against Iraq, as Israeli civilians began carrying gas masks to protect them from a possible Iraqi attack.
Major General Amos Gilad, the official government spokesman concerning the Iraq campaign, confirmed broadcast reports that Sharon received word from the US administration before the air attack.
"It has already been made public that the prime minister got warning," he told Army Radio, but Israel had no active role.
Gilad said that Israel is not part of the war against Iraq, "and therefore Israel should not be disappointed that it was not part of the planning for this particular operation."
Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom told reporters yesterday, "We don't intend to have a high profile in this war."
In the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun early yesterday, about 700 Palestinians, most of them schoolchildren, waved Iraqi flags and posters of Saddam Hussein and burned two US flags after the attack in Iraq.
Among the slogans they shouted were "Death to America, death to Bush," and "We will sacrifice our soul and our blood for Saddam."
The military on Wednesday instructed civilians to remove their gas masks from boxes and install their filters. The announcement said Israelis should carry their gas masks with them everywhere they went, and children took their masks to school yesterday.
Meanwhile, several thousand Israelis in the Tel Aviv area, target of Iraqi Scud missiles in 1991, were leaving for safer parts of the country, like Jerusalem, unlikely to be hit because of its holy sites, or Eilat, far out of range at Israel's southern tip.
However, a poll showed that 84 percent of the Tel Aviv region's 2 million people did not plan to leave. The poll, in the Yediot Ahronot daily, questioned 505 people and quoted a margin of error of 4.5 percent.
Most of the Arab world is opposed to a war against Iraq, and Iraq has not threatened Israel, insisting that it has no non-conventional weapons and will not carry the war beyond Iraqi borders. US officials reject the Iraqi assurances, and some Israelis were nervous.
About 2,400 families from the Tel Aviv area registered in the southern town of Kiryat Gat on Wednesday. Eight leading hotels in the Jerusalem area reported a surge of more than 1,500 calls from Tel Aviv residents looking for rooms.
British Airways began canceling its flights to Israel on Tuesday night. Germany's Lufthansa canceled its Wednesday evening flight from Frankfurt to Tel Aviv and said it would reevaluate the situation yesterday.
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