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Attorney Smadar Ben-Natan on Monday said police had acted improperly and "had done things they never should have" during their searches and detention of seven suspects, including six activists from the New Profile organization on Sunday.

According to New Profile, police searched the homes of seven people allegedly linked to the New Profile Web site and another Web site called "Target 21," on suspicion that they incited readers to evade military service in violation of the law.

Among those detained were 70-year-old Analine Kirsch, the daughter of a family of Righteous Gentiles who converted to Judaism and married a Holocaust survivor, 51-year-old Miriam Hadar, Amir Givol from Jerusalem, Sergei Sandler from Beersheba, and Roni Barkan from Tel Aviv.

In a letter to the deputy attorney-general for special tasks, Shai Nitzan, Ben-Natan, who represents New Profile, said that in addition to investigating two elderly women who had committed no crime, police had also seized computers belonging to the suspects and their families, including one belonging to a psychologist that contained confidential information about his patients.

Detectives also searched the offices of the Jerusalem-based human rights organization Hamoked-Center for the Defense of the Individual because one of the suspects had once worked there. The office, which does a great deal of legal work on behalf of individual Palestinian human rights, contains "an enormous amount" of classified documents, Ben-Natan wrote.

She also said the investigation did not focus on actions perpetrated by the suspects but on the opinions they had expressed on the site, allegedly including in the organization's charter. This was a violation of the fundamental right of freedom of expression, she said.

The New Profile charter states: "While we were taught to believe that the country is faced by threats beyond its control, we now realize that the words 'national security' have often masked calculated decisions to choose military action for the achievement of political goals. We are no longer willing to take part in such choices. We will not go on enabling them by obediently and uncritically supplying soldiers to the military which implements them.

"We will not go on being mobilized, raising children for mobilization, supporting mobilized partners, brothers, fathers, while those in charge of the country go on deploying the army easily, rather than creating other solutions."

The investigation of New Profile began on September 15, 2008.

According to a statement issued by the Justice Ministry spokesman at that time, the Web sites of New Profile and Target 21 were suspected of preaching evasion of military service, thereby violating Article 109 of the Penal Law. They were also suspected of helping those slated for military service to obtain an exemption by deceit or by knowingly submitting false information, the ministry said.

The request to investigate the Web sites originally came from Military Advocate-General Brig.-Gen. Avichai Mandelblitt in February 2008. The move was part of a crackdown on military service evasion that began after the Second Lebanon War in the summer of 2006.

In her letter, Ben-Natan referred to a ruling handed down by the High Court of Justice in January 2006 on a petitio