Sleepless In Gaza

BBC Gaza correspondent was freed by his kidnappers in early July after spending 114 days in captivity. Today, he recounts his kidnap ordeal.

An excerpt...

Through all this I gradually came to know my guards.

One of them, a man in his mid-20s called Khamees, with a dark, quite handsome face, would be with me almost every day. Right through to the kidnap's frightening climax.

Khamees had matured into a battle-hardened, urban guerrilla. Like many young men who I had met in Gaza, Khamees was the son of a family that had either fled or been driven from their home in what is now Israel.

He had been raised in the poverty of one of Gaza's intensely crowded cities, and been drawn to the militant groups that had fought the occupying Israeli army.

Khamees had matured into a battle-hardened urban guerrilla.

He walked with a limp and had a slightly misshapen torso, the legacy of a wound inflicted by the Israelis. But they were not his only enemy.

He had trouble too with both of Gaza's main factions, Hamas and Fatah.

He lived confined to the shadows - almost literally, in the second of our hideouts - where the shutters on the windows were kept closed and I did not see the sun for nearly three months.

Khamees would exercise by pacing up and down the gloomy corridor, counting the laps on his prayer beads.

He spent countless hours flipping through the Arabic satellite television channels, and often, far into the night, he would sit in a pale blue robe, reading aloud from the Koran.

Occasionally he would let me go through to his room and watch television for an hour or two.

And one day he allowed me to see my parents make a televised appeal for my release.

After worrying about them so much, it was a vast relief to see my father make a powerful and dignified address. And although my mother did not speak, when I looked into her eyes I was somehow sure that she too had the strength to cope.

I felt very bad at having brought the worst of the world's troubles crashing through my parents' peaceful lives, far away on the west coast of Scotland.

My kidnappers - the most frightening kind of people - were putting them under appalling pressure, and all of Britain was watching.

But my parents were not being broken. They were, in Dad's words, "hanging in there" - and for me, it was their finest hour.

To let me see my parents on television was an act of kindness on the part of my guard. And there were certainly others.

In the second of our four hideouts - where I was held longest - Khamees allowed the regime to become quite lax.

My door was left unlocked so that I could go to a bathroom and even use a kitchen next to my room, where eventually I was boiling water and fixing very simple meals for myself twice a day.

And there were moments when Khamees would be friendly, when we would talk a little about Gaza, and about politics or Islam.

But mostly I will remember Khamees as a dark and moody figure.

Often, for days at a time, he barely spoke to me, refusing to respond if I said hello.

Handing me my food, he would just glare at me hard, saying nothing, and a number of times tiny things sent him into frightening rages that I came to dread.

It was often easy to imagine that he saw me as a great burden, and that he loathed me.

And when he smashed me in the face in the final moments of the kidnap, I felt that with Khamees, perhaps, all along violence had never been far below the surface.

Read Alan's full account

[Tarboush Tip: Mary Kate]