Good evening. This is John Bachelor. Tonight the show begins in the greenhouses of Gaza 2005.

With my colleagues I was there to broadcast from Gaza, this is the southern part of the long strip along the Mediterranean.

At that time there were farms there and greenhouses raising flowers and fruits that were sold with great prosperity to Europe.

All those greenhouses were attached to a farming community and houses along the rim of the bottom of the Gaza Strip.

There was the Rafa crossing.

This is before the Israelis found it necessary to protect the south part of the Gaza Strip from infiltration

with the Philadelphia line.

This is 2005.

We broadcast from a field, a natural bowl. It was near the beach. You could hear the roar of the waves. You could also hear, I think, mortar fire somewhere north of us, Gaza City.

Israeli defense forces were part of the evacuation, the exit of the farmers. They left everything behind, all of the

community buildings, all of the houses, the greenhouses. I am told over the years that they were all torn down and

destroyed by Hamas once they got control of the whole of the Kaza Strip.

I don't know.

I've never seen any pictures afterwards as to what happened.

We spent the night broadcasting, sleeping beforehand in a farm building that had been emptied of the former residents,

broadcasting, there was one incident that was fun. Israeli defense forces were running routine

patrols throughout the night on the roadway and we had a long extension cord

into a power center, a power socket. We needed power for the

broadcast. We were in a little van out in the middle of this natural bowl. I think it had been used

for concerts. In any event, the IDF came by, we didn't know it, they didn't

know it, they ran over our power cord and for a moment the power went out, broadcasting

live to New York and then it came back on. Also in the middle of the night,

...