The High Court of Justice responded Monday to a petition by nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu that the order prohibiting him from leaving the country, speaking with foreigners or approaching foreign embassies would remain in force for another six months. The court told Vanunu that after the six months were up, he could petition the court again to annul the order.
Vanunu was released from prison in 2004 after serving an 18-year sentence for revealing details of Israel's nuclear weapons program.
Before the hearing, he said: "I want and need freedom and only freedom. Twenty-five years is enough. This is not my government. I want to see the world, to be beyond the Mossad and the Shin Bet."
Vanunu distributed to the press a letter he wrote earlier this year to the Nobel Prize committee, in which he declined to be on the list of candidates for the prize because President Shimon Peres, who he said was "behind the Israeli atomic policy," was a Nobel laureate.
Vanunu's attorney, Avigdor Feldman, told the court his client wanted to have a family, and asked "Is it logical to hold a man all his life in this imprisonment?"
Deputy State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan told the justices that Vanunu continued to meet with reporters and reveal state secrets.
"The state believes Vanunu has information he has not passed on, he has said so in a letter. Three different panels of this court decided after seeing classified material that he has top-secret material he has not yet divulged.
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