Israel lifted months of censorship on a military espionage case today confirming the arrest of a former woman soldier charged with leaking more than 2,000 military documents to a newspaper.
Anat Kamm, 23, has been under house arrest since December, but the case was kept secret by a court-imposed gagging order. The restrictions were eased after details of the case were reported by foreign media.
Kamm is accused of copying more than 2,000 classified military documents and giving them to the Haaretz newspaper. Some 700 were classified as "top secret."
She is charged with passing information with the intent of harming national security. Her lawyer, Eitan Lehman, denied this.
"At no stage of this affair was Israel's security damaged. Certainly, there was no intent to do so," he said.
The Justice Ministry said the gagging order was necessary for security reasons and to allow officials to try to recover the classified documents. Only some of the documents were recovered, it said, in part because the Haaretz journalist who allegedly got them has left the country.
The order drew criticism from local media because the foreign reports were easily accessible over the internet. In some cases, local newspapers published websites with the reports, or even copies of foreign reports, with all relevant names and details blacked out.
Prosecutors allege Kamm was the source for a Haaretz story accusing the military of killing Palestinian militants in violation of a Supreme Court ruling.
Israel's targeted killing policy was one of its most contentious in its years of bloody battle against a Palestinian uprising that began in 2000. Critics charged it to be illegal extrajudicial killing, while supporters credit it with quashing the Palestinian campaign of suicide bombings and shooting attacks.
In late 2006, Israel's Supreme Court set strict restrictions on assassinations in the West Bank, limiting them to extraordinary cases. Officially, the military stopped the practice following the ruling.
The Haaretz report cited a document from March 2007 that included an order from Maj. Gen. Yair Naveh, then the top Israeli commander in the West Bank, permitting firing upon three top Palestinian militants even if they did not pose clear and present dangers.
That summer, one of the men, Ziad Malaisha of Islamic Jihad, was killed in Jenin. Experts interviewed by Haaretz said the order was illegal. Naveh told Haaretz at the time that the killing was justified and did not violate the court ruling. Naveh is now retired and refused comment.
At the time of the memos, Kamm served in Naveh's office.
Israel requires reporters to submit stories to a military censor that can block publication of information deemed damaging to national security.
The Haaretz reporter who wrote the story, Uri Blau, recently was assigned to London and believed to be in possession of some of the sensitive documents.