JNS
She was charged with "exceeding authority to the point of harming the state's security."
A female Israel Defense Forces soldier who handled classified documents and was arrested last week after illegally visiting Ramallah in Samaria turned out to have a secret affair with a Palestinian resident of the city.
Palestinian Authority police detained the young woman on Saturday after she entered Ramallah, which is located in Area A of Samaria, where Israeli citizens are forbidden by law from entering for security reasons.
P.A. security forces transferred the woman into the custody of the Israel Police, who released her after she claimed to have taken a wrong turn.
On the same day, she entered the city for the second time, only to be arrested again. Following her repeated arrests, security forces learned she was a soldier in the IDF's Military Intelligence Directorate serving in the Information Security Department, responsible for preventing classified files from being compromised by enemy elements.
During interrogations by the IDF Military Police officers, the soldier initially claimed to have gone to Ramallah in an attempt to buy drugs, before admitting to having a secret relationship with a Palestinian man.
The pair had allegedly been dating for around a year, and they had been meeting in Ramallah due to the P.A. resident being barred from entering Israel's pre-1967 lines following Hamas's Oct. 7 massacre.
The army said that while the soldier was arrested due to serious charges of "exceeding authority to the point of harming the state's security," she was released pending the investigation into her actions.
The statement stressed that an initial probe found that the soldier had no intent to cause harm to the state's security by dating the P.A. resident.
"The soldier served as a bureau clerk for several months. Following the report, she is now under investigation, and findings will be forwarded to the Military Advocate General's Office after its conclusion," the army said.
The suspect has been removed from her position in the Military Intelligence Directorate pending the criminal investigation.
In November, Jerusalem announced it had foiled a network of Hamas terrorists using dozens of fake social media profiles to extract sensitive information from IDF troops, including on which army units would be sent into the Gaza Strip and when they would be deployed.
The accounts made contact with soldiers and "managed a kind of romantic relationship … through correspondence, voice recordings and video calls" in order to gather intel for the Gaza-based terrorist group.
