Israeli army whistleblower and the Palestinian hit list

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Israeli army whistleblower pleads guilty to lesser charges in plea bargain


JERUSALEM — A former Israeli soldier signed a plea bargain agreement Sunday in which she admitted to an espionage charge for passing secret military documents to a newspaper reporter in an ideologically motivated campaign.

Anat Kamm will likely face a lengthy prison term when she is sentenced in the coming months.

Kamm copied more than 2,000 military documents from army computers between 2005 and 2007, while she served as a low-ranking clerk in the office of the general who oversaw policy in the West Bank, according to the indictment released by Israel's Justice Ministry.

The documents included operational plans, personnel lists and lists of targets. During that time, Israeli troops frequently carried out arrest operations in the West Bank and often clashed in gunbattles with militants.

In 2008, after her discharge and while working as a reporter for an Israeli website, Kamm gave the documents to a journalist for the daily Haaretz. The Haaretz reporter published some of them in investigative articles, including one about the military's targeted killings of Palestinian militants.

Israel's Shin Bet security service investigated the leak and arrested Kamm in December 2009, though her detainment was made public only four months later. She has remained under house arrest since the entire time.

The Haaretz reporter, Uri Blau, was in London around the time of Kamm's arrest, and remained abroad for roughly a year to avoid prosecution. He returned to Israel in October after signing his own deal with prosecutors in which he returned the documents and was not charged.

According to earlier court documents, Kamm had told investigators that she wanted to disclose certain Israeli military operations to the public and provide evidence of "war crimes."

Sunday's plea deal said only that Kamm had unspecified "ideological motives." Kamm has argued that she did not mean to harm anyone, and noted that all of Blau's stories were submitted to Israel's military censor before they were published.

Israeli authorities said the documents could have endangered the lives of Israeli soldiers, and initially charged Kamm with harming state security.

Sunday's plea bargain included two lesser but still serious charges — one of espionage, for amassing and holding classified information, and a second of passing on classified information.

"I confessed to the clauses in the indictment with which I was charged," Kamm, who is in her early 20s, told reporters in court Sunday.

Kamm's sentence has yet to be decided by the court. The first charge carries a maximum of 15 years in prison, and the second carries a maximum of seven years, prosecutor Hadas Forer-Gafni told Israel Radio.

Prosecutors will push for a "long and significant" prison sentence for Kamm, Forer-Gafni said.

She is expected to be sentenced in April.

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