Hostage reveals she snapped in final hours of captivity

The British human rights activist Kate Burton has described how she became embroiled in a shouting match with her Palestinian captors as tempers frayed on both sides during the last nerve-wracking hours of her kidnap ordeal.

The tension reached breaking point as the gunmen holding her and her parents, Hugh and Helen, were preparing to make a video stating their demands and Ms Burton, 24, was urging them to release the family in one of a series of intense debates.

In her first detailed account of the 58-hour ordeal to three British newspapers, including The Independent, she said: "The situation was starting to get very tense.

Maybe they felt they hadn't achieved what they wanted.

They began getting nervous and started shouting at me.

One of the two main guys said: 'I can't believe you have been so disrespectful.

We have given you blankets, we have treated you so well.'""I got really mad and said: 'I can't believe you're doing this.

Do you want me to get down on my knees and say thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you?' I was exhausted and started crying.

I said: 'I came here to work with the Palestinian people and now I feel I have been stabbed in the back.'"Ms Burton made it clear that this was one of the few occasions when the kidnappers behaved in anything other than a calm, even hospitable, way towards their victims - after seizing them at gunpoint - or in which her own remarkable self-possession briefly cracked.

She said that from the time they arrived at about 4.15pm last Wednesday at the first of three Gaza safehouses, "they tried to make us feel at home in the Arab style.

They offered us tea, coffee, water, chocolate, popcorn.

You don't want to co-operate with them by accepting, but then you feel guilty because they have been so kind - beyond the fact, of course, that they have kidnapped you."She revealed that the kidnappers had contacted the British consulate general shortly after their seizure to tell them they were holding the family.

But the kidnappers had confiscated the family's mobile phones after one brief telephone conversation she had been allowed to have - in Arabic - with Eduardo Ali, a friend who called her.

She admitted that she had emailed British diplomats about her parents' impending trip to Gaza and had been referred to last month's travel advice from the Foreign Office, advising Britons against all travel to Gaza.

Ironically, she had wanted to use her parents' 24-hour trip to Gaza to "show them the good side of the Palestinian territories and to reassure them that she was relatively safe working in Gaza".

She added: "I feel really guilty.

I feel irresponsible.

I'm the one who lives here and should have known better.

I have given them their worst Christmas and holiday ever."While the emotions of all three Burtons had gone "up and down" during the ordeal, they appear to have kept their composure to an impressive extent, although her parents had both said that this would be their last trip to Gaza.

The kidnappers had offered the family packages of new clothes.

Although the family were reluctant to accept them, Ms Burton said: "My mother put on the trousers and told the guys she wanted to wash her knickers.

Then she asked one of them to hang the knickers up on the line outside the house.

I think she wanted to embarrass him a bit.

He blushed a bit, but put them up on the washing line."She explained that they had been moved twice at night, first on Thursday to a house in southern Gaza five minutes away from the first one, and the second time on Friday night - after a power cut which delayed production of the video - to a second house either in Gaza City or northern Gaza.

She said that her father had been "irritated" on the first day and had repeatedly stressed to the kidnappers that he and his wife had a flight to catch and had asked them whether they realised that the Erez crossing from Gaza into Israel closed at 9pm.

Ms Burton's account - easily the most graphic yet given by a victim of the series of kidnaps in Gaza over the past year - appeared to reflect her own conflicting feelings of guilt about exposing her parents to the ordeal and anger towards the kidnappers themselves, but also an element of sympathy towards what she saw as the desperate conditions in which they live.

Ms Burton said she felt "sorry for the guys" because of their "shattered lives", and the fact that they were in effect on the run and had family members who had been killed in the conflict.

But, at the same time, she added: "I can't forgive them for what they did and I hope they don't keep doing it in the future.

I understand that the majority of the Palestinian people are not like them."Ms Burton emphasised that she wanted to continue working in the occupied territories, but would "assess her options" about where.

She admitted that she was a "bit worried about personal security" in the event of a return to Gaza.

While Ms Burton, who speaks Hebrew and Arabic, is strongly pro-Palestinian, she added: "I have a lot of Israeli friends.

I speak their language and I try not to get too involved.

You have to stand back and see there are two sides to every issue."She said the kidnappers had told the family "they had a made a mistake.

They said they thought we were Americans.

But when I said you have made a mistake so why not let us go, they said it was too late." They told the family repeatedly that they would be released unharmed "in a few hours".

She also said the kidnappers may have had links to Fatah or Islamic Jihad.

- INDEPENDENT