As a retaliatory missile attack began hitting Jerusalem and Tel Aviv on Thursday following initial strikes by the Israeli Air Force against Iranian targets, Coloradans with kin in the Middle East were feeling the heat — in real time.

“My kids heard the explosions,” said Amir Kaufman, a former infantry captain in the Israel Defense Forces who had served in operations against Hezbollah and other terrorist groups from 1992 to 1997. Kaufman now lives in Denver.

A week ago, Kaufman and his wife sent their daughters Ayelet, 17, and Avigail, 15, on what was to be a month-long trip to visit their grandparents in Tel Aviv. That’s where they were when the official alerts began, ordering citizenry to hide in bomb shelters and seek safe rooms.

“The kids had to help their grandparents to the shelter,” Kaufman recalls. “As a captain, I never experienced anything of this magnitude.”

In a cellular era, the children have been in constant contact, and while the missile attacks remain a threat and Ben Gurion Airport is closed, the daughters won’t be returning any day soon.

That’s fine with the kids, Kaufman told The Denver Gazette.

“They’re asking us not to shorten their trip. They want to be there and experience what it means to be an Israeli.”

“Without their parents,” he added.

The Kaufmans are among many Coloradans with kin and other close ties to Israel as the attacks between the two nations play out. At press time, a hundred or more retaliatory missiles had been fired from Iran against Israeli targets. The large majority were reportedly intercepted, but seven to nine rockets penetrated defenses, causing 60 or more civilian injuries and one reported death.

“It begins to look a lot like the Six Day War,” said retired physician Herzl Melmed of Denver, who recalled how he and his wife Hazel were a young, married couple with a newborn when Arab armies encircled what then was an even smaller Israeli state in 1967.

The couple had spent three of their 10 years there in the far northern town of Safed, very close to the frontline fighting, when Arab armies again attacked in 1973. The small hospital where he served had been flooded with casualties, both Israeli and Syrian.

In both wars, Israel prevailed, launching a preemptive strike in 1967 that destroyed enemy bombers at their bases, leading to a rapid ground assault.

Melmed draws a parallel to the current attack, as the IDF preemptively struck nuclear facilities and command leadership, at a moment when Israel believes Iran nears a potential threshold of building as many as 10 nuclear bombs.

“There was the same sense of dread as the Arab armies gathered,” Melmed recalled. “A sense that terrible things would happen, and here we are again living through a similar situation.”

Micheline Ishay, director of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Denver, told The Denver Gazette she found Israel’s strike early Friday morning to have been both surprising and expected.

“Israel’s targeting of Iran’s nuclear capabilities came from a sense that Iran is very close to building its own nuclear weaponry, something Israel sees as an existential threat.”

“The Israeli government is also concerned that Iran is looking to rebuild its Axis of resistance,” Ishay said, referring to Hezbollah’s forces in Lebanon and the Houthi rockets and other forces in Yemen. “Israel sees the attack as a way to make sure Iran is not pursuing that rebuild.” 

She doubts, however, than Israel can complete all of its objectives without American assistance.

“The one thing they cannot do without the Americans is attack the nuclear program at Fordow (in Iran),” Ishay said. “The nuclear program there is inside the mountain and really, really deep underground. There’s a wide belief among experts that Israel lacks a bunker-buster bomb of sufficient size.”

She added that the U.S. is suspected to have such a bomb.

Melmed, who leads an informal Middle East study group around the U.S. and chairs a support organization, Action Israel, said the situation might have been far more dire if Iranian backed forces in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza had not been so degraded by successful operations over the past year, and by the overthrow of Syria’s government.

“You have massive armies on southern, northern and eastern borders with hundreds of thousands of rockets, and an impregnable tunnel system. You would have regarded it as miraculous if Israel had tried to attack Iran with Hamas and Hezbollah intact. The damage would have been incalculable,” Melmed said. 

Kaufman, the former IDF officer, noted that Israeli citizens are far better protected against missile attack than was the case when he served. Homes built after the First Gulf War are required to have reinforced safe rooms within, as opposed to older homes served by public shelters.

“It’s a pure guess, but I think it will be a few more rough days,” he said, “depending on the ballistic missile threat and if they are able to address it.”