Trust
How we source, check and correct
Israel.com publishes numbers and reports that people plan around. This page is the standard those pages are held to, written plainly enough to hold us to it.
Archive articles
242
preserved from the previous site
Rewritten and sourced
242
in plain English, with citations
Citations on the site
980
each one opened and checked
Corroboration bar
2 orgs
or one official body, to publish
The rule
Incident facts are frozen. Context is researched.
One sentence governs everything in the news section, and it is the sentence to judge us by.
When Israel.com reports an event, every detail of that event (every name, age, town, unit, count, weight, date, charge and quote) comes from the material the report was written from, and from nowhere else. It is never sharpened. If a police statement says “a large quantity of drugs”, this site says a large quantity of drugs. It does not supply a weight that sounds plausible, and it does not infer a motive the statement never gave.
Everything around the event (what a unit does, where a place is, what a law provides, how common this kind of case is, what the trend looks like) is researched separately and carries a link to the work it came from. Those links were opened and read. A claim that could not be sourced was cut rather than softened into a hedge.
The consequence worth stating: a shorter article is the honest outcome of thin material, and several articles on this site are short for exactly that reason.
Publishing
What clears the bar, and what does not
New reporting is written from a cluster of independent reports of the same event. An event qualifies when two organisations that do not share a newsroom have reported it, or when an official body has announced it in its own name. A single unattributed claim, however widely repeated, does not qualify.
Before an article appears it is checked for corroboration, for shape, for attribution, for originality against the material it was written from, and for grounding: every factual sentence has to trace back to that material. An article that fails any check is withheld rather than published with a caveat.
Where sources disagree, the disagreement is the story and the page reports it. We do not pick the version that reads better.
Citations
What each label on a source means
- Official
- The subject's own account: a police or IDF statement, a ministry release, a court filing, a company announcement. Authoritative about what the body says, and not independent evidence that it is so.
- Reporting
- A news organisation's account, produced by its own staff. Two of these from unconnected newsrooms is what independent corroboration means on this site.
- Data
- A published dataset or statistical release: the Central Bureau of Statistics, the Bank of Israel, the Water Authority, the Knesset Research and Information Center. Cited with the year the figure belongs to.
- Reference
- Encyclopaedic or archival background. Used to orient a reader, never as the only support for a contested claim.
The archive
Why the old headlines are gone
Israel.com inherited hundreds of articles from its previous incarnation. They were machine translations of Israel Police, IDF and ministry statements, and the release's opening sentence had been used as the headline, sometimes two hundred characters of it, ending mid-thought.
Those pages carry search traffic and inbound links, so their URLs have been kept exactly as they were. What changed is the writing: a real headline, plain English, background a reader outside Israel actually needs, and sources. Each rewritten page shows the headline it used to carry, so a reader arriving from an old search result can see they are in the right place.
The original statement text remains in the repository behind the site and can be compared against the rewrite at any time. That is the check on this programme, and it is deliberately one anybody can run.
Corrections
What happens when we get something wrong
Every publisher gets things wrong. The difference is what happens next.
- A factual error is corrected as soon as it is confirmed, and the article says what was corrected.
- An article whose central claim does not hold up is withdrawn, not quietly rewritten into something defensible.
- A source that turns out to be wrong is removed from the citation list rather than left in place to pad the count.
- A page that cannot meet this standard does not get published, which is why some stories in the news cycle never appear here.
To report an error, use the contact route on the about page. Include the URL and the sentence.
Data and photography
The rest of the site
Every tracker and calculator on Israel.com names its data source on the page and shows the date of the reading. Where a live source is unreachable, the page serves the last known value and labels it as such rather than showing a stale number as current.
Photographs are licensed from Unsplash and credited to the photographer on every page they appear on. They illustrate subjects, never events. Most news stories carry a generated illustration of the story’s subject, made to rules that bar text, faces, flags, harm and any staging of the event, and reviewed before it is stored; a story whose illustration did not pass review carries a drawn map or card instead. Every illustration is labelled “Illustration” in the frame and says in its caption that it is not a photograph of the events reported. Nothing on this site is an AI-generated image presented as a photograph.
The tools
How the calendar tools are checked
Every date tool on the site is compared against Hebcal by a script, and what follows is whatever the last run found, on 2026-09-06. Nothing in it is typed by hand.
Gregorian to Hebrew dates
9,866 civil dates converted to the Hebrew calendar, every day of 27 sample years between 1900 and 2100: all agree with Hebcal.
Hebrew to Gregorian dates
109 Hebrew dates converted back to civil dates, Hebrew years 5661 to 5853, including 30 Cheshvan, 30 Kislev and 30 Adar I where they exist: all agree.
Holiday dates
105 holiday start dates, 15 holidays in every year from 2024 to 2030: all agree with Hebcal.
Sunset, candle lighting and havdalah
Sunset for 106 of 106 cities on Friday 2026-09-11: 77 within a minute of Hebcal's and 106 within two, largest difference 2 min. Havdalah: none this week, because a festival begins on Saturday night and Shabbat runs straight into it. Neither side publishes a time; both publish a second candle lighting. Published candle-lighting times: 106 of 106 within two minutes, largest 2 min.
Yahrzeit and Hebrew birthday rules
168 yahrzeit and Hebrew-birthday dates over 12 edge cases (Adar in a leap year, 30 Adar I, 30 Cheshvan, 30 Kislev), 15 years each: all present in Hebcal's own tables.
The comparison runs every Monday and on demand, makes 367 spaced requests to Hebcal's public interfaces, and writes its counts to a file the pages read. If a run finds a disagreement, the panel on the affected tool turns amber and prints the number. The rule is that the count is never edited: the tool is fixed, or the page keeps saying what the check found.
Hebcal is the reference because it is the calendar most synagogues and communities publish from. Agreement with it is agreement with what a reader's own community calendar says, which is the only accuracy that matters for a candle-lighting time.
The data
Datasets you can download
Every tracker and explorer publishes the table behind it as a plain CSV, with its source and its licence. Tables Israel.com computes itself are released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0: use them, with a link.
Lake Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) water level, 1966 to present
Source: Israel Water Authority, Other (Open), as declared on data.gov.il.
Population of Israel by year, 1960 to present
Source: World Bank, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (World Bank open data).
Aliyah to Israel by year, country of origin and absorption town
Source: Ministry of Aliyah and Integration, Other (Open), as declared on data.gov.il.
Derived tables are licensed under CC BY 4.0. Source tables carry their publisher's own terms, linked from each data page.
Frequently asked questions
Who writes Israel.com's news?+
Articles are produced by the Israel.com newsroom: a research and drafting pipeline whose output is published under the newsroom's name rather than an individual byline. Every article states what it was written from and links its sources, which is the accountability that matters. Nothing on this site is presented as eyewitness reporting, and nothing claims a correspondent we do not have.
What does "checked against N sources" mean?+
It means the page cites N separate works, every one of which was opened and read while the article was written, and each of which supports a specific claim on the page. It does not mean N organisations independently witnessed the event: sources marked Official are the subject's own account. Where the incident itself rests on a single official statement, the page says so in the fact-check note.
Why do some articles carry an illustration or a drawn card instead of a photograph?+
Because there is no honest photograph of most of what this section covers. A file photograph may illustrate a subject; it may never stand in for an event. Reports of violence, crime, casualties and emergencies therefore carry a generated illustration of the setting or the hardware, never the event itself, labelled Illustration wherever it appears and described plainly in its caption. Where no illustration has passed review the story carries a drawn locator map of where it was reported, or a designed section card, unmistakably not a photograph. Where a photograph does appear, its caption names what it actually shows and says that it was not taken at the events described.
The archive articles read differently from the originals. What changed?+
The headline and the prose. The archive arrived from the previous site as machine translations of official statements, with the release's opening paragraph used as the headline. The newsroom rewrote them in plain English and added independently sourced background. The facts of each incident are unchanged and still traceable to the original statement; everything added around them is cited on the page.
Do you take payment for coverage?+
No. Israel.com does not accept payment, sponsorship or supplied copy in exchange for editorial coverage, and no article on the site is placed or amended on behalf of an advertiser or a partner. The site does carry advertising: sponsored listings from the business directory, always labelled "Sponsored", always outside the editorial copy, and never a factor in what the newsroom or the guides say. An advertiser cannot buy a mention, a ranking, or a review anywhere on the site.
How do I report an error?+
Write to the newsroom through the contact route on the about page with the URL and the specific sentence. Factual errors are corrected as soon as they are confirmed, and an article whose central claim does not hold up is withdrawn rather than quietly edited.