Somewhere in Gaza, BBC correspondent Alan Johnston is marking his 45th birthday this Thursday.

Alan went missing on 12 March, and is now being held, it appears, by a group that goes by the name of Jaish Al-Islam, the Army of Islam.

In an audio recording posted on the Internet, the group is demanding the release, among others, of Jordanian-born Abu Qatada, an al Qaeda sympathiser currently detained in Britain. The British government has raised the issue of Alan with Abu Qatada, who has expressed a willingness to do what he can to win Alan’s release.

Wherever Alan languishes in Gaza, he can probably hear the sound and fury of the madness raging outside, as gunmen from Hamas and Fatah battle it out in the streets.

The brave Palestinian reporters in Gaza -- and I’ve spoken with many of them -- were stuck indoors while the gunmen struggle for control of the ruins.

Watching them, all of whom I know well, huddled in Ramattan Studios -- where the CNN office in Gaza is located, incidentally -- while a battle raged outside was stressful enough. Being there must have been 10 times worse.

But here’s the paradox: As a journalist who hates being office-bound, who hates watching news unfold from afar, who loves the field’s taste, smell, feel and adrenalin, I have to confess: Part of me, a big part of me, wishes I was there. Yes, it’s dangerous. Yes, it’s probably insane, and my wife would verbally whack me on the head repeatedly for even saying it, but it’s true.

"It’s a good thing you’re not there now," an Israeli official told me yesterday. "You would be a walking target." I know. I know.

But for me Gaza is important. I was there in July 1994, at the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, when Yasir Arafat stepped foot on Palestinian soil for the first time since before the 1967 war.

It was pandemonium from the first moment he crossed the border. In the chaos as he got into a car to drive from Rafah to Gaza City, I jumped on a truck right behind him and rode all the way. Palestinians lined the road all the way north, cheering on their leader.

And as Arafat rode by the Israeli settlement of Kfar Darom (now abandoned and in ruins,) I watched as settlers on the ramparts booed and hissed him. In Gaza City I fought my way through the huge crowd that had jammed into Gaza’s main square to hear him speak. It was one of those days in a journalist’s career when you really felt like you have a seat on the front row of history.

Less than two weeks later I was in Gaza, at the Erez crossing between Gaza and Israel, when the first clash broke out between Palestinian security forces and the Israeli army. It was then, cowering behind a block of concrete as bullets zipped overhead, that I concluded the peace process, not even a year old with the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords in September 1993, was doomed to end in bloodshed and bitterness.

I heard many, many more bullets and explosions when I covered Gaza at the beginning of the second intifada. And it was in Gaza that I was shot in the back, at the Karni Crossing, on Halloween, 2000. Four years later I was in a taxi in Gaza when my colleague, producer Riyadh Ali, was kidnapped. And these are just a few dubious highlights of my time there.

Gaza is full of memories, some happy, many not so, but none forgettable. And I’m hoping that, sooner rather than later, I’ll be able to go to Gaza, and Alan Johnston will be able to leave.

-- From CNN Senior Correspondent Ben Wedemen