Tel Aviv, April 09: An Israeli journalist has been under house arrest for over three months accused of leaking classified military documents on unlawful assassinations in the occupied West Bank, media reported on Thursday after a gag order was lifted.
Some of the documents are the alleged source of a 2008 Haaretz newspaper report that Israeli soldiers had received orders to carry out illegal assassinations of Palestinian militants in violation of an Israeli Supreme Court order.
Twenty-three-year-old Anat Kam is accused of copying the documents and giving them to an Israeli newspaper during her time in the Israeli military, between 2005 and 2007.
Kam is set to go on trial later this month on charges of “treason” and “espionage”, a charge which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.
Kam allegedly handed most of the top secret documents to Haaretz reporter Uri Blau, who then wrote a series of articles on the targeted killings in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank.
The leak “posed a direct and real threat to the lives of IDF (Israel Defence Force) soldiers and Israeli citizens,” the head of the Shin Bet domestic intelligence service, Yuval Diskin, told Israeli editors.
“If these documents, even part of them, reach enemy hands or foreign intelligence agencies, this could cause serious, ongoing security damage and danger to IDF soldiers and Israeli citizens,” he was quoted as saying.
Kam’s lawyer, Avigdor Feldman, told army radio his client had found orders that went against the supreme court decision and her conscience in the computer of Brigadier General Yair Naveh, then commander of Israel’s central region that also covers the Palestinian West Bank.
While the Haaretz articles were published in October and November 2008, Kam was only arrested over a year later and has been under house arrest since December 2009.
Haaretz said that Blau, who has been out of Israel since last December, has been negotiating with the legal authorities for his return.
The reporter had handed to Shin Bet in September 2009 about 50 of the documents, but Diskin said there are “reasonable grounds to suspect that Blau has additional documents in his possession.”
The Shin Bet chief said Blau was wanted for interrogation. “We carried on with this investigation too long,” he said.
Shin Bet had asked for the gag order to be lifted.
Despite coverage abroad, Israeli media had made only vague references to the case in previous days but were barred from giving details until a Tel Aviv court on Thursday lifted the more than three-month-old gag order.
—Agencies