Israeli woman jailed for leaking military documents

Oct 30, 2011, 11:05 GMT

Tel Aviv - A former Israeli woman soldier was on Sunday sentenced to four and a half years in jail, for passing top secret military documents to a newspaper.

The Tel Aviv District Court handed Anat Kam, 24, a further sentence of 18 months probation, a transcript of the court ruling said. Kam was convicted in February after a trial that began in May 2010.

The sentence was not reduced for the approximately two years she spent under house arrest.

Kam was convicted of copying 2,085 documents, some 700 of them classified as 'top secret' and 'secret,' while serving in the office of the army's commander in charge of the West Bank between 2005 and 2007.

After her discharge from the army and while working as a journalist for an online media site, she passed much of the material - over 1,500 documents, including 150 top secret and 330 secret documents - to the left-liberal Haaretz daily.

She did so in a meeting with Haaretz journalist Uri Blau in September 2008, after which the paper published a series of articles on Israeli army conduct in the West Bank. It is not clear whether Blau will face prosecution.

One of the articles, published in November 2008 and headlined Licence to Kill, described a meeting of army officials planning the targeted killing of a Palestinian militant. The plan was in violation of a 2006 Supreme Court ruling setting strict rules for such operations.

Kam had initially faced charges of passing on secret information without the authorization to do so, with the intention of harming state security, for which she could have faced a life sentence.

But under a plea bargain, the lesser charge was preferred of collecting and passing on secret information, without aiming to harm state security, with a maximum sentence of 15 years.

The judges rejected a claim that Kam had merely been naive, ruling she had acted for ideological reasons.

'It is hard to believe, especially considering the level of her intelligence, that she didn't understand the built-in prohibition of passing on classified information from the Israeli Defence Forces,' the judges wrote.

'It is even harder to believe that she failed to understand the significance, consequences and danger of passing on vast information to a journalist for publication,' they said.

A left-liberal lawmaker, Zahava Galon of the Meretz faction, urged that the file against Blau be closed, as the court had ruled there had been no intention to harm state security.

But a hardline legislator, Michael Ben-Ari of the ultra-nationalist National Union, said the court was taking espionage and treason too lightly and treating Kam as a petty 'car thief.'

While a minority of Israelis on the left applauded her, the vast majority regard her actions as treasonous.