The IDF was forced to carry out adjustments to Operation Cast Lead military plans due to documents stolen by former soldier Anat Kamm and given to Haaretz reporter Uri Blau, a senior IDF officer told Army Radio overnight Thursday.
The officer said that after the IDF became aware of the leaked documents, a series of meetings were held at the highest military levels, which resulted in operational changes being made in order to ensure the safety of the IDF soldiers in Gaza.
Meanwhile, Kamm’s mother, Ada Gersht, said that her daughter never had any intention of damaging Israel’s security and denied that she had radical leftist tenancies.
“Anat was a regular girl and had a regular childhood,” she told Army Radio. “She was very intelligent and knowledgeable, and knew how to express herself well, both orally and in her writing."
"But she never occupied herself with any political activities of any persuasion, and never belonged to the radical Left, contrary to the picture they are trying to paint in the media," she continued. "I want to believe that High Court rulings don't just apply to the extreme Left.”
“If she wanted to harm state security, she would have passed the documents directly to the Washington Post,” added Gersht. "But she chose not to do that, which proves she never had any intention of harming state security – and I’ll put my life on that.”
Meanwhile, in his first response since the scandal broke, Blau wrote in Friday’s Haaretz that he never imagined he could come back to Israel as a free man, and called the affair a “battle over the country’s image, not for my personal freedom.”
In his article in Haaretz on Friday, Blau wrote that a large amount of his "detailed personal information" had been obtained by authorities, that he had been warned that his phone was tapped and that unknown parties had broken into his Tel Aviv home.
He had been away from the country on a trip to China when he was told of Kamm's arrest, he said.
His newspaper later arranged for him to remain in London rather than return home, claiming the Shin Bet security service had broken a promise to grant the reporter immunity and allow him to protect his sources if he returned some of the most sensitive documents and had his computer destroyed.
"When I left Israel I had no reason to believe my backpacking trip with my girlfriend would suddenly turn into a spy movie," he wrote. "Experiences I have read about in suspense novels have become my reality in recent months."
When he realized he could be charged himself, Blau wrote, "I decided to fight."
"With apologies for using lofty language, this isn't only a war for my personal freedom but for the character of the country," he said.
At an extraordinary press conference on Wednesday, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) announced that it now planned to accelerate its investigation of Blau, who is believed still to be in possession of hundreds of top-secret classified military documents that were stolen from the IDF by Kamm.
With the whereabouts of most of the documents still unknown, Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin warned of a direct, ongoing threat to national security, and said his agency should have “taken the gloves off” long ago in pursuing the culprits.
According to the Shin Bet, in a case that was shrouded in secrecy for months until a court-imposed gag was lifted on Thursday, Kamm copied more than 2,000 documents when she was assistant to the bureau chief of OC Central Command Maj.-Gen. Yair Naveh between 2005 and 2007.