Israel Summer Time

Two days after the Declaration of Independence, the provisional government introduced double Summer Time in Jerusalem to save fuel, extending this to the whole of Israel from May 23.

Due to the global energy crisis because of the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, Summer Time was enacted again from 1974–1975.

The 1992 time zone law stipulated that IDT will be operated for at least 150 days each year, and that the final dates will be decided by the minister of the Interior, subject to the approval of the Knesset committee for internal affairs.

In some years the decision as to which day summer time would start or end was made at the last minute due to political haggling and this caused disruption to international airline schedules at Ben Gurion Airport.

[8][dubious – discuss] Until 2005, the start and end of IDT each year was established in an ad hoc fashion as the result of haggling between political parties representing various sectors of Israeli society.

This led to various ad hoc solutions to the problem in Windows systems and other Microsoft software (e.g. Outlook calendar entries were often off by an hour when shared, due to the lack of IDT support).

[10][11] On 6 June 2011, Internal Affairs Minister Eli Yishai announced his support for extending IDT, setting the ending time to the beginning of October.

[12] On November 5, 2012, the Knesset approved the bill to extend IDT to a period of 193 days, beginning on the Friday before the last Sunday in March (at 2:00 local time, or 0:00 UTC, clocks are moved forward by one hour), and ending on the first Sunday after October 1 (at 2:00 IDT or 23:00 UTC Saturday, clocks are moved back by one hour).

[14] In March 2020, the Israeli government planned to delay daylight saving in order to discourage gatherings during coronavirus.