As the two Palestinian gunmen who had abducted Kate Burton and her parents, Hugh, 73, and Win, 55, prepared to video their captives as a condition of their release, she burst into a tear-filled rage demanding they be set free.

“The kidnappers were getting nervous and angry and started shouting at me,” she said. “They told me I was being disrespectful, despite all the food and blankets they’d given us. I got really mad. I screamed at him, ‘Do you want me to get down on my knees and say thank you, thank you?’

“I was exhausted and started crying and crying. I told them, ‘I came to work with these people and I feel like I’ve been stabbed in the back’.”

Her comments came in the first comprehensive interview she has given since spending 58 hours as a captive. After a further debriefing with British intelligence officers, Ms Burton, an Arabic speaker who had been working with a Gaza human rights group, described how her outburst had briefly delayed their freedom as the kidnappers did not want her to look bad in the video.

Ms Burton, 24, continued to show mixed feelings for her captors, who had treated the hostages well and even proudly shared pictures of their own children.

“I can’t forgive them for what they did to me, but I think they will keep doing it in future. I feel sorry for these guys. Their lives are completely shattered. They’ve no freedom of movement; no family life. They can’t stay at home because they’re wanted by the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority.”

She described how the kidnappers, with whom she had long ideological discussions, pounced after tailing the family for an hour after they left a Gaza refugee camp on Wednesday. “It was very surreal,” she said. “It’s like you’re in a dream and you can’t quite believe this is going on. I felt embarrassed because I knew the risks and still took the chance. Perhaps it’s a feeling of shame, too. And guilt. Lots of things.

“From the start they were saying, ‘Please don’t be frightened. Tell your parents not to worry.’ They kept saying we’d be freed in a few hours. But after a while we didn’t believe the guy because he said so many things.”

The kidnappers soon tired of holding the family and simply wanted to be rid of them.

Nonetheless, the hostage drama also generated moments of farce. After two days Mrs Burton demanded to wash her underwear and passed the wet garments to one of the gunmen to hang up to dry.

“My mother went to wash her knickers and then brought them back to one of the guys just to embarrass him a little bit,” she said. “She asked him to hang them up on the line. He blushed a bit and put them up.”

Ms Burton expressed her own guilt at having taken her parents to Gaza, despite Foreign Office travel advice not to make such a visit. “I feel really, really guilty,” she said. “I feel irresponsible. I’m the one who lives there and should have known better. I wanted them to see it was safe and feel a bit calmer about where I lived. But I’ve given them their worst Christmas and their worst holiday ever.

“They were curious and they’d been aware of the risks. That’s why we’d kept it to a day at the end. But the last thing they said was, ‘We’re never coming back’.”

However, Ms Burton, who also speaks Hebrew and worked on a kibbutz, plans to stay in the region and hopes to go on working for the Palestinian people. But she does not plan to return to Gaza.

“I’m concerned about my own personal security,” she said. “I don’t know if my life would be at risk. I want to stay working with the Palestinian people. I think I couldn’t be anywhere else. I’d feel guilty if I turned my back on them.”

FAMILY’S DAYS IN CAPTIVITY

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