Israeli woman accused of leaking secrets

JERUSALEM, April 8 (UPI) -- An Israeli reporter is accused of leaking secret military papers alleging Israel illegally killed militants instead of capturing them alive, officials said.

Anat Kam, 23, who worked for Israel's Walla news agency but now says she doesn't, is charged with passing information with the intent of harming national security, Israel Security Agency officials said.

She is accused of taking about 2,000 documents, 700 of which were classified as "top secret," while serving in the Israeli military's Central Command in 2007 and then leaking them to Haaretz "for ideological reasons," Israel Security Agency chief Yuval Diskin said.

Haaretz published a story Oct. 28, 2008, that accused the military of defying an Israeli Supreme Court ruling against killing wanted Palestinian militants who could have been captured alive.

It published another story the following month suggesting the military had quietly loosened its rules of engagement and marked terrorists for assassination, The Jerusalem Post reported.

Israel's Supreme Court in September 2006 set strict rules, limiting assassinations in the West Bank to extraordinary cases in which an alleged terrorist posed a clear and present danger.

The military said it stopped the assassination practice after the ruling.

But Haaretz's story cited a March 2007 document that said Maj. Gen. Yair Naveh, the top Israeli commander in the West Bank at the time, OK'd a policy to kill three key Palestinian militants even if they didn't pose a clear and present danger.

Kam, currently under house arrest, served in Naveh's office at the time.

The leak "posed a direct and real threat to the lives of (Israeli) soldiers and Israeli citizens," the Post quoted Diskin as saying Thursday.

The reporter of the 2008 stories, Uri Blau, was moved to London in 2009, Haaretz said. Israeli security officials said Thursday they believed Blau still had classified documents.

Haaretz and Blau had no immediate comment.