Sharon was talking about military preparations - Arrow anti-missile batteries, Patriot launchers and other, more esoteric means of preventing Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from hitting Israel with Scud missiles, as he did during the 1991 Gulf War.

But despite the prime minister's confidence, preparations of another kind also are taking place. Yesterday morning in this Tel Aviv suburb, Meir Hospital staged a full-fledged chemical-attack drill.

It began with a simulated missile barrage. Within minutes, the first ambulance arrived bearing the inscription "Donated in honor of Prof. David Rudavsky and Sonia Rudavsky of New York." The ambulance carried the first theoretical casualty - a volunteer stripped to his underwear.

The "patient" and hundreds more were placed on stretchers, dosed with absorbent powder and rushed to a decontamination center - 50 water hoses mounted on two long metal structures, manned by emergency workers in plastic space suits and gas masks.

"The structures sit here permanently in the parking lot," said Dr. Ilan Kutz, leader of the emergency psychiatric team. "People park right under them every day and never notice. It's a great example of denial."

In the parking lot, triage followed decontamination, and medical crews rushed stretchers along color-coded paths: blue for critical, yellow for stable, green for shock and stress. "The whole hospital turns into a giant emergency," Kutz explained.

If chemical warheads land in Israeli cities, most of the stretchers will be heading down the blue and yellow lines, but green will be busy, too. "When a missile first lands, people don't know what's in it," Kutz said. "Some panic and develop psychosomatic symptoms." One of his greatest concerns is keeping hysterical citizens from flooding the hospital.

Meir Hospital is 15 minutes from Tel Aviv, but it will receive patients from all over - as long as it isn't contaminated by an incoming chemical warhead itself. These patients will include both Jews and Israeli Arabs - but not Palestinians from the nearby West Bank.

"Of course, we'll treat them if they show up," a doctor told me. But in case of an Iraqi attack, the army will almost certainly close the West Bank for security reasons - polls show a high degree of Palestinian support for Saddam. The Palestinians have their own hospitals, but they are not equipped to do much for the victims of chemical warfare.

Nobody knows how much Israeli hospitals can really do, either. In the drill, 80% of the critical patients survived.

"That's an excellent percentage," a ward chief told me.

Will that many survive a real attack? I asked.

He shrugged. "Probably not, but you never know. We don't have any real experience with this."

Nobody does. Yet.

That's what makes mass casualty drills at once surreal and grimly practical. If America goes after Saddam, Israeli hospitals may very soon become front-line laboratories for war in the age of chemistry.

"I've never seen anything like this," said Anthony, an American medical student from Albany, as he surveyed the bodies of "casualties" being decontaminated in the Meir Hospital parking lot. "But here's the thing: What we learn here today, we may wind up using at home tomorrow."