The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) on Friday threw its support behind a group of Israeli journalists who on 12 April will challenge the secret ban in court, joining other free media advocates against censorship.
"CPJ supports more transparency in this and any case when the facts are as nebulous as they are," said Mohamed Abdel Dayem, who heads the New York-based group's Middle East and North Africa program.
"We're happy to see an Israeli media organization challenging the gag order," Abdel Dayem told Ma'an, applauding Israel's Channel 10 television, which plans to approach the courts even sooner now that foreign news agencies and newspapers have reported the story.
Within the past 24 hours, three British newspapers ran stories on Kam's ongoing detention. The Independent has published two reports this week, while The Times and The Guardian broke their silence on Friday along with The Associated Press, whose story was republished in The New York Times and Washington Post.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has called for the ban to be lifted, insisting that it amounts to a violation of freedom of expression as the ban prevents talk over the rationale behind Kam's ongoing detention.
"We would like to see the gag order lifted. It's not really relevant anymore," said Lucie Morillon, who heads RSF's New Media Desk. "It can be read online, so this doesn't make any sense," she told Ma'an Thursday.
Israelis should be allowed to read about it in their own media, Morillon said, rather than the international and Palestinian press. "They have a press that is usually quite free, and Israeli journalists are more than capable of leading this public debate," she added.
Although under censorship, two of the country's major newspapers have referenced the case.
Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's most widely circulated daily, on Thursday ran a short op-ed "for foreigners only" entitled, "What does the Shin Bet not want you to know?" "What all the world's citizens are allowed to know is denied to Israelis: foreign newspapers and international media publish a story whose details cannot be published in Israel," the author noted. "It's just Israelis who don't know about it."
Another newspaper, Ma'ariv, has published ambiguous references. One came in a January op-ed about a non-existent country that secretly jails journalists, asking its subscribers whether that country should still be considered a democracy. Another reference appeared as a satirical correction. "Due to a gag order, we can't tell you what we know. Due to laziness, indifference, and misplaced trust in the defense establishment, we don't know anything," the Hebrew-language daily explained Friday.
Although her arrest is not yet public, sources say Kam will go on trial for espionage on 14 April. Prosecutors will claim she copied at least two classified military documents during her mandatory army service. The alleged documents are believed to have inspired a 2008 investigation by Haaretz reporter Uri Blau that alleged the Israeli military has repeatedly violated a 2006 ruling by the High Court of Justice against certain types of "targeted assassinations," predominantly those in which a non-combatant was killed.
Colleagues believe his report was longer than the one Haaretz ultimately published in November 2008. It was said to have been approved only when the censor became aware of hundreds of other highly classified documents -- allegedly provided by Kam -- proving the assassinations story was just the tip of the iceberg. Giving the okay to one part of the story, sources claim, put the damper on more damaging elements.
Despite that many Israeli journalists believe Israel's intelligence community wants to make an example out of Kam in an effort to dissuade others from exposing documents in the future, knowledgeable Israeli sources say Blau is the real target. "They're really after him," said one source in contact with the Haaretz reporter.
A year after the story's publication, Israeli authorities seized Blau's computer, Ma'an has learned. Blau, who happened to be in China at the time, remains abroad. Colleagues say he fears arrest if he returns to the country. Blau did not respond to inquiries about his present location, although his colleagues say he is somewhere in the United Kingdom. His latest story's dateline is London.
Jared Malsin and Mya Guarnieri contributed to this report.
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