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One place, two time zones
Same Place, Different Clocks
One group follows Israel and the other does not. People there have to ask themselves which time zone they are on, depending on who they are and where they are.
One Clock Per Place
That breaks a basic assumption of time zone software, which treats a place as having one clock. Location alone cannot tell a program what time it is for a person standing on a given street.
Beyond Any Rule
There is no way to code that into a program. Every other oddity, from half-hour offsets to skipped days, can be written down as a rule attached to a country or a date. This one depends on which of the two populations a given person belongs to.
How does software handle places with their own zones?
The IANA time zone database lists separate entries for the Palestinian territories, Asia/Hebron and Asia/Gaza, apart from Asia/Jerusalem. Each entry carries its own daylight saving rules. A phone or server picks the entry by a zone identifier, not by raw location. Which identifier a person's device uses is a setting, not something the software can infer from a map position.
Why do zone identifiers name places instead of offsets?
A region name keeps the complete history of rules for that region, including past offsets and daylight saving dates. An offset such as plus two hours says nothing about when the clocks change. Naming by region lets one change in the database update every device that uses it. Two neighboring places can therefore have different identifiers even when they share the same offset for part of the year.
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