Anat Kam in court (file)
Anat Kam in court (file)Israel news photo: Flash 90

Anat Kam, 23, who was arrested and charged in early January with espionage, has lost a bid to relax the conditions of her house arrest. Kam is charged with stealing over 2,000 documents, some highly classified, from a computer at Central Command, where she served as a soldier.

The fact that despite the severity of the charges against her, Kam was placed under house arrest and not full arrest, has caused much consternation among nationalists, who speculated that the court showed her lenience only because she belongs to the left.

However, Kam asked to have the house arrest relaxed by replacing the human supervision she is currently required to be under with a electronic bracelet. This, her lawyers argued, would ease the burden on her mother and father who currently have to supervise her, and allow her to leave home every day “to get some fresh air for an hour.”

High Court Judge Elyakim Rubinstein rejected the requests, noting that not enough time had elapsed since Judge Ayala Procaccia had handed down a decision rejecting a similar request by Kam. Procaccia had even made the conditions of Kam's house arrest slightly more stringent than they had been.

"The [electronic] cuffing, as far as I understand, is generally intended to complement human supervision and not replace it,” Rubinstein said. “In human supervision there is an element of taking responsibility. That is – when the trust in those involved is not full, additional 'security elements' are added. The electronic bracelet, a product of the current era, is like the addition of suspenders to a belt,” he explained.

Rubinstein added that Kam is allowed to communicate with whomever she wants to, except for the journalists mentioned in the charge sheet (to whom she allegedly passed on the stolen files – Ed.). Her friends may visit her in her family's Tel Aviv home and she is allowed to stay in her family's other home in Jerusalem as well. He added that Kam is required to present herself at a police station once3 a week and that this, too, can be seen as a breath of fresh air.