Court clears agriculture minister

JERUSALEM, Feb. 23 (JTA) — Israel’s agriculture and environment minister has been cleared of charges of misusing classified information and violating a person’s privacy. Rafael Eitan and two members of his Tsomet movement had been accused of extracting information from the personal army file of another party member to prevent him from becoming director general of Tsomet. The Haifa court Feb. 19 also cleared Tsomet activist Haggai Ashur and Gonen Segev, a member of Tsomet who later served in the Labor government of Yitzhak Rabin. The court, however, decided to pursue legal action against another Tsomet activist, Sami Shenfeld, who is accused of procuring the personal information from the army database while serving in the reserves.