Court reduces sentence of ex-soldier who leaked classified documents to reporter

The Supreme Court on Monday reduced by one year the prison sentence of Anat Kamm, who was convicted of leaking classified military documents to a journalist during her army service.

In 2006, while serving as an assistant in the office of Maj. Gen. Yair Naveh — then commander of Israel’s Central Command — Kamm made copied of thousands of documents from his office. After she was discharged from the army, she passed them on to Haaretz reporter Uri Blau.

In 2008, Blau published details from the documents in a series of articles that led investigators to Kamm’s door, and in 2010 she was arrested for espionage.

In February 2011, Kamm signed a plea bargain that stipulated that she would not be charged with harming national security if she pleaded guilty to leaking state secrets. In October 2011, she was sentenced to four and a half years in prison and 18 months’ probation.

Monday’s decision, made by Supreme Court justices Edna Arbel, Zvi Zilbertal and Uzi Vogelman, reduced the sentence to three and a half years.

In her appeal, Kamm claimed that the severity of her sentence was discriminatory in light of the fact that Blau, who received and published details from the stolen documents, was sentenced to only four months’ community service. She emphasized that she had since expressed regret for her actions.

Kamm, who was under a full house arrest for two years from her arrest until her conviction, claimed that the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court based the severity of her sentence on the “ideological” motivation for her crime. However, she said, the judges in her original trial did not give sufficient weight to the fact that she and Blau had returned all of the stolen documents to the state, and that none of the documents fell into the hands of parties hostile to Israel.

Stuart Winer and Aaron Kalman contributed to this report.