Israeli Woman Gets 4.5 Years for Leaking Army Secrets to Media

A Tel Aviv court on Sunday jailed a young Israeli woman for four-and-a-half years for spying and leaking classified military documents to Israel's Haaretz newspaper, officials said.

A transcript of Sunday's ruling obtained by Agence France Presse said Anat Kam was given 45 days to appeal the sentence, which comes on top of the time she had already spent under house arrest since December 2009.

Kam was convicted in February under a plea bargain which saw her admitting to charges of "serious espionage" and "passing on classified data" in return for the prosecution dropping a charge of intent to harm state security, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

The court on Sunday sentenced her to 54 months in jail, with an additional 18 months suspended for three years from completion of the term.

Kam was placed under house arrest in December 2009 and a month later, was charged with stealing more than 2,000 military documents, including details of operational planning and force deployment, during her army service between 2005 and 2007.

Some of the documents were used as source material for a Haaretz article which said troops had been ordered to carry out targeted killings of Palestinian militants in violation of an Israeli Supreme Court order.

The journalist who wrote it, Uri Blau, was reportedly given immunity from prosecution after handing over the classified documents in his possession.

Kam said her actions were ideologically motivated and that she wanted to expose the army's policies in the Palestinian territories.

In Sunday's sentencing, Judge Nurit Ahituv wrote that the manner in which Kam copied 2,085 documents, took them home and passed more than 1,500 of them to the newspaper more than a year later, showed that it was not an impulsive act.

Of the 1,500, 150 were classified as "top secret" and 330 as "secret," the judge said.

"In our eyes, this is not a random and one-off lapse, a momentary loss of judgment," she wrote. "There was a chain of actions during which at any stage the defendant could have pulled back from carrying them out."