A Tel Aviv court on Tuesday convicted an Israeli journalist on charges of possession of secret military documents.

Ha'aretz newspaper reporter, Uri Blau, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four months of community service, as part of a plea bargain deal, cut last month with the State Prosecutor's Office.

"In retrospect, I could have acted differently in various points along the way," Blau said following his conviction.

In 2008, Anat Kam, who was then serving at the army's Central Command in Jerusalem, gave Blau a disk-on-key memory stick containing more than 1,800 confidential documents.

One of the documents contained operational details of targeted killings of Palestinian militants, which the Supreme Court had earlier ruled illegal.

"I worked to inform the public as a journalist and a person concerned with state security," Blau added in his defense.

"I must provide the public with maximum information to enable it to fully judge and understand reality," he said.

Kam was convicted of severe espionage last October, along with passing secret information without authorization.

She appealed her 4.5-year sentence last week, in light of Blau' s plea.

Kam's lawyer, Ilan Bombach, argued that the prosecution discriminated against his client and exercised "selective enforcement" in the two cases.

Blau said that his criminal conviction and what he characterized as Kam's "harsh punishment" were "not things he had wished for."

While prosecutor Hadas Forer reprimanded Blau for returning the documents only in October of 2010 - two years after the affair unfolded - she also specified the lenient terms of his sentence.

She noted that Kam was the one who initiated contact with Blau, and that his article was authorized for publication by the military censorship.

She also stated that the state took into account the unique nature of the case: the first time Israel has tried a journalist for possessing confidential documents.

"This is a precedent-setting prosecution of a journalist for doing his job. The public's right to know and freedom of press are seriously damaged by the decision to put a journalist on trial for these reasons," Blau's lawyer, Jack Chen, told the Ynet news site.

"Possession of secret materials is a matter of routine for reporters; anyone claiming otherwise is either naive or lying," Chen asserted.

Meanwhile, the Israel Journalists' Association expressed fears that such an indictment against a journalist could endanger freedom of the press.

"The association is troubled by the nature of the plea bargain which reinforces the State Attorney's stance regarding classified documents obtained by journalists," they said in a statement.

In June, dozens of journalists protested the decision to indict Blau, demonstrating outside the Justice Ministry, including placards asking "Am I a spy?"

"It wasn't right to charge Blau," Ha'aretz publisher Amos Shocken told Walla! News.

"This prosecution puts a question mark on a journalist's ability to work with the Israeli defense system," Shocken said.