On the first night of his captivity, Alan Johnston’s kidnappers put a hood over his head, handcuffed him and took him outside. He feared he was about to be executed.

“You wonder at that point what’s going to happen,” said the BBC journalist today, shortly after emerging in the middle of the night from a 16-week “appalling” ordeal at the hands of some of Gaza’s most brutal gangsters, and into the glare of a media scrum.

“It was like being buried alive, removed from the world. It was occasionally terrifying,” said Mr Johnston, looking tired and thin but otherwise displaying remarkable composure and lucidity for a man whose fate had been such a narrow-run thing for so long. “It’s hard to put into words how good it is to be free,” he smiled at a 6am press conference hastily organized by his Hamas liberators.

"I dreamt, literally dreamt, of being free again and always woke up in that room. It's almost hard to believe that I'm not going to wake up in a minute in that room again," he said.

Blockade drains life from Gaza

The movement of goods into Gaza had been intermittent at best since Hamas won Palestinian elections early last year

BACKGROUND

• Israel continues Gaza blitz as 310 dead

• Q&A: Hamas and Gaza

• 97 days and counting for BBC's man in Gaza

• Now war is with the enemy within

• The little girl trapped by a quirk of war

When he was kidnapped on March 12 by the self-styled Army of Islam – widely scorned in Gaza as a mercenary gang of car thieves and thugs for hire – Gaza City was a lawless battleground between Hamas fighters and their secular rivals from Fatah. During his captivity, Hamas seized control of the coastal strip and vowed to bring all lawless elements to heel. With his release, the Islamist movement trumpeted that victory.

Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister sacked by President Mahmoud Abbas for the movement’s military campaign to drive out Fatah’s hated security apparatus, made full use of the occasion, draping Mr Johnston in a sash in the colours of the Palestinian flag and awarding him medals and badges.

Mr Johnston accepted the various insignia with a smile of forbearance, before greeting a throng of Palestinian press colleagues, with whom he had worked for almost three years, with hugs and kisses on the cheek.

“The last 16 weeks were of course just the very worst of my life,” he said, wearing a blue suit jacket, jeans and denim shirt. After Hamas secured his release at around 3am – apparently by pledging an amnesty for the Army of Islam – he was whisked off for a shower and shave before being presented to Mr Haniya.

Unable to digest the daily fare of Gaza food, he had twice fallen sick with stomach problems and an allergic reaction. He begged his captors to find him more simple foods, like potatoes and eggs, and they complied. But still, he worried that his ill health could be ignored by the men who on one occasion dressed him in a suicide bomber’s explosives belt and threatened to “slaughter him like a lamb”.

“You felt they were perfectly capable of watching their wretched television while I died," he said.

Although his abductors told him at the outset they would not kill or torture him, they later taunted him with murder threats. He had no idea if they would make good on their threats, but said there was almost no violence until the last half hour, when he was “knocked about a bit” by the kidnappers as they prepared to surrender him to the Hamas forces besieging their Gaza city block.

At one point during his long imprisonment, he was chained by the wrists and ankles in a small room for 24 hours, when it appeared negotiations with Hamas were going badly. When the Army of Islam feared Hamas might attack, they forced him into the explosives belt.

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