“It was just thunder”.

Those were the words former Sunrise host David “Kochie” Koch’s daughter Sam spent days telling her young daughter as Iranian missiles were intercepted in the airspace above their Dubai home.

For five days, Sam tried to shield little Florence from the reality unfolding outside their apartment as interceptions lit up the night sky and massive booms echoed across the city.

“Never in a million years did we expect this kind of situation to unfold in Dubai,” Sam told Sunrise on Thursday.

“We were having regular missile interceptions happening above us, which were very loud and uncertain.”

Sam said the first night was especially frightening, with multiple alerts from the UAE government sounding on their phones while explosions rang out overhead.

To keep her daughter calm, she told Florence the blasts were simply thunder during what became “five days of thunder”.

“It was a very rough few days in Dubai, that’s for sure,” Sam said.

On Wednesday night, the former Sunrise host, who fronted the breakfast show for 21 years before stepping back in 2023, was reunited with his daughter and granddaughter.

He told Sunrise it has been a stressful few days for the entire family.

Their departure on an Emirates flight came suddenly after Sam spotted news of it in a local expatriate WhatsApp chat group.

With just an hour to pack, they rushed to the airport.

Sam said she didn’t tell her family they had secured seats until the plane was already in the air.

“We also knew that they would be concerned for us as we were taking off from the region,” she said.

Kochie said his first thought when he finally learned his daughter and granddaughter were on the flight was whether they had cleared the region safely.

The family had only recently moved to the region, but said they were relieved to be back home for now.

Two of Sam’s older children remained in Sydney at boarding school during the ordeal, where Kochie and his wife have been acting as their guardians.

“You can imagine mum, dad, and Flory, their four-year-old, in basically a war zone. It’s pretty stressful on the whole family,” Kochie said.

More flights are expected to bring additional Australians home, but Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong has warned they could be cancelled at short notice as the situation continues to evolve.