I’ve got to admit I was thrilled when Alan told me he was thinking of putting in for the Gaza job. I’d left the Strip about a year earlier, and was missing it terribly. Alan is rightly described as a journalist’s journalist – and discovering he wanted to be a correspondent there was akin to discovering your younger sister just got the best and most inspiring teacher on staff at her school.

It’s not a job for everyone. Gaza is after all the world’s most crowded city state. Its situation is perennially desperate. It’s prone to intense bouts of violence. And psychologically, it can do very strange things to an outsider who settles there.

I had shell shock nightmares when I left. Of a vast archangel, trapped in my room, whose wing span stretched across the breadth of the room, so that its tips scratched the walls. I would lie asleep, imagining I was awake, with this terrifying creature lying in a downy cocoon next to the bed.

I was told it was a shell shock dream, because it was the kind of dream soldiers had after World War One. The kind of dream when you imagine something beautiful and good turned to evil. The kind of dream that I guess makes sense when you’ve seen children shot, buildings flattened by vacuum bombs, and every funeral comes with a cortege of masked men, and a hail of gunfire.

But it’s the seeing of these things that makes it so important that there are correspondents who work and live there.

When I first began working there, I was shocked that Palestinian journalists never seemed to contact the Israelis to get the other side of the story. I thought at first it was a wilful denial of balance, and poor journalism. I urged the younger journalists I was working with to call the Israel Defence Forces – so that when Hamas or Islamic Jihad faxed out a press release revealing a border skirmish, they could tell the other side of the story as well. But of course, as one of my much wiser colleagues explained, any Palestinian found to be calling Israel on their mobile phones left themselves open to charges of collaboration. And no job was worth the response that would bring.

Balance is a strange beast. As an outsider in Gaza, you can be immune to charges that you’ve become to close to one group or another. Of course, all kinds of things are probably happening that you’re unaware of. Friends, who you think are only that, in fact become sponsors, or at least their clan can form a protective shield about you. The mukhabarat (intelligence) will have a file on you, but their reach is limited, which means that you can operate successfully. You can exist on the fringes, and observe.

Of course, there’ll always be claims of bias, purely by virtue of your reporting from inside the Palestinian territories. But that’s no reason to stop. All kinds of things go on in Gaza which we need to know about. The only way that can happen is if journalists, both Palestinian and foreign, are able to work there.

What’s happened to Alan Johnston is a tragedy. An appalling abuse against a good man, who does his job with grace, humility and courage. He and his family need our support.

But the last thing I’d imagine he would want is for us to let the situation in Gaza drift from our front pages, and from our television screens. Now more than ever is the time to support those who continue to work there, and recognise the vital importance of the work they do.

Kylie Morris is a presenter of More4 news and a former Gaza correspondent for the BBC