| name | israeli-org-sources |
| description | Find and fetch the details of an Israeli government office, health fund, municipality or utility — which portals carry branch hours and phone numbers, and which of them can actually be fetched by an automated client. Covers the Cloudflare wall on gov.il and what to do instead. Use when locating an Israeli organisation's contact details, or when a fetch of an Israeli site fails. |
Finding and fetching Israeli organisations
Two problems, in this order: knowing which site carries the details, and getting
the page out of it.
Fetching — what works
Route by target, not by habit. Israeli sites commonly refuse traffic from
cloud IP ranges, so the default web fetch is the least likely to work here.
| Target | Route |
|---|
gov.il | Neither headless route works. See below. |
btl.gov.il, taxes.gov.il, iec.co.il, health funds, municipalities | mcp__gateway__geo-egress__fetch_markdown — egresses from an Israeli residential IP |
| JS-rendered pages, logins, branch-finder widgets | mcp__gateway__playwright__browser_navigate + browser_snapshot, same egress |
| Anything the above refuse | claude-in-chrome — the user's own Chrome, with its real profile |
The gov.il wall
www.gov.il sits behind Cloudflare and returns 403 to every automated
client, including from an Israeli residential IP. Verified 2026-08-03:
curl with a browser user-agent — 403- headless Playwright — 403, page title
Attention Required! | Cloudflare
- the site's own
/api/* paths (/api/DataGovProxy/GetDataGov,
/api/PublicationApi/…, /api/general/GetUnitsList) — 403, HTML challenge
rather than JSON
So there is no headless route to a gov.il page, and no JSON back door. Do not
spend turns retrying it with different headers. Either:
- drive the user's real browser with
claude-in-chrome, which presents a
genuine profile and passes the challenge; or
- ask the user to paste the page. This is not a defeat — it is usually
faster than any of the alternatives, and the user is already looking at the
page that prompted the request.
Other government hosts are not all behind the same wall: btl.gov.il and
taxes.gov.il both served content to a plain fetch on the same date. Test the
specific host rather than assuming the whole sector is blocked.
Where the details live
| Organisation | Where to look | Notes |
|---|
| Kol Zchut — כל זכות | kolzchut.org.il | Rights wiki, Hebrew with Arabic and Russian editions and an עולים portal. Fetches cleanly. Often clearer than the agency's own page about what an office actually does, though hours there can lag. |
| Bituach Leumi | btl.gov.il | Branch list with counter and phone hours. Fetches cleanly. |
| Tax Authority | taxes.gov.il | Fetches cleanly. |
| Population and Immigration Authority (Misrad HaPnim) | gov.il | Behind the wall. Appointments run through MyVisit. |
| Ministry of Aliyah and Integration | gov.il | Behind the wall. |
| Health funds — Clalit, Maccabi, Meuhedet, Leumit | each fund's own site | Clinic finders are usually JS widgets; expect to need the browser route. |
| Municipalities | the city's own site | Also the source for which short code (106/107/108/109) is that city's call centre. |
| Israel Electric | iec.co.il | Fetches cleanly. |
| Google Maps / Business | | Good for address and a phone number. Its hours are fixed clock times only, so Friday entries are routinely wrong and Saturday: Closed hides a motzei-shabbat reopening. Treat as a lead, not a source, for anything Shabbat-adjacent. |
Verified 2026-08-03 by fetching each host from an Israeli residential IP. The
status of a host is not the status of a page — a portal that answers may still
404 the specific branch page you want, so check the content you actually got.
Search terms that work
Search in Hebrew. An Israeli office's own page will not rank for its English
name, and often does not have one.
<agency> שעות קבלת קהל <city> — counter hours<agency> מוקד טלפוני — call centre<agency> לשכת <city> — the branch page<agency> זימון תור — appointments
Use the colloquial name in the search (משרד הפנים) and the formal one when
reading the result (רשות האוכלוסין וההגירה) — see
reference/hebrew-vocabulary.md for the mapping.
Deciding what to trust
Agency pages disagree with themselves routinely: the branch page, the national
page and the appointment system will each state different hours for the same
office. When they conflict:
- A photograph of the sign on the door beats everything.
- The branch's own page beats the national page.
- The appointment system beats both for whether a service needs a slot.
- Google's hours lose to all of the above.
Record which one you used in source.method and note the disagreement in
confidence. The next person to look at the entry needs to know it was
contested, not just what you picked.
