For most Americans, the first word of Iraq's second missile attack on Israel came shortly after 12:30 a.m. Friday night, when television news flashed unconfirmed reports of explosions in the city of Tel Aviv.

Michael R. Kelsen '90 needed no such second-hand report. From his hotel balcony in Tel Aviv, he could see the flash of light and feel the tremors in the ground that signalled the beginning of the renewed attack.

"It was pretty hairy this morning," Kelsen said in a telephone interview with The Crimson early Saturday morning, at about 1 p.m. Israeli time.

"I was standing on the balcony and I saw the missile come in and just BOOM. It shook the whole ground."

Kelsen, a former Undergraduate Council officer who has been studying Middle Eastern politics at Hebrew University in Jerusalem on a Wallenberg fellowship, knew what he was getting into when he went to Tel Aviv to work as a translator for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Only a few hours before he took the job, Iraqi Scud missiles had struck the cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa, inflicting only limited damage, but striking renewed fear into the hearts of many Israelis.

Most of the Americans studying in the Hebrew University program had already left the country, Kelsen said. The few who remained--mostly Jews, he Said--were simply watching and waiting for the next move.

"It's unexpected, but the big thing here is boredom," Kelsen said in an earlier interview from Jerusalem, shortly after the first attack had subsided.

"Everybody is huddled inside--you're not supposed to leave the house. It's a scary thing. You look outside and everything is silent. It must be like the early days of the Blitz in London."

Initially, Kelsen said, Israelis felt a great sense of relief at the news that American-led military forces had commenced a massive air attack on Iraq to eliminate Saddam Hussein's chemical arsenal and nuclear potential.

People stopped hoarding food and supplies, and life returned to a semblance of normality for a brief moment, Kelsen said.

"There was a great sense of euphoria here--people assumed that Iraq had been taken out."

That feeling came to an abrupt end at about 2 a.m. Thursday morning, when Israelis across the country were roused from bed by the wail of air raid sirens.

"It was deafening," Kelsen recalled on Friday. "It ripped me out of bed. I turned on army radio and there was nothing special--there was music, and I thought it was a false alarm."

"And then I looked out of the window and there was a lot of fighter activity."