Dear Mr. Paul,

I agree with you, and there will be a studied plan to determine the beginning and  the end of summer time in Palestine for the coming years. You will be provided with any update on the subject as soon as the official decisions are obtained.

I would also like to point out that PSST is an acronym for Palestine Standard Time

PSDT stands for Palestine daylight saving time

With respects,

Sent from Mail for Windows

From: Paul Eggert
Sent: Tuesday, January 4, 2022 8:08 PM
To: heba.hamad@mtit.gov.ps
Cc: laith.daraghmeh@mtit.gov.ps; rasheed hanoon; Time zone mailing list
Subject: Re: The State of Palestine has adopted the first part of thespecification for its time zone

On 1/4/22 09:12, Eliot Lear via tz wrote:

> The TZ update process here has no formal recognition of governments (any governments).  Still, statements from governments, however they reach this group, tend to carry a lot of weight.

Quite true. In the past we've given a lot of weight to official

government documents, and we welcome future cooperation in this area as

this will streamline communication. (All too often for many countries in

the past, we've had to rely on third parties or the popular press to

forward their governments' information to us, which has resulted in

inaccuracies and delays in updating the database.)

From the timekeeping point of view, the most important thing is to know

the UTC offsets and the rules for when daylight saving time starts and

stops in Palestine, and for technical reasons it's best to have this

nailed down well in advance - preferably at least a year before rules

change.

Currently for Palestine, tzdb lists standard time of UTC+02, and it says

daylight saving time starts at 00:00 on the first Saturday on or after

March 24, and ends at 01:00 on the first Friday on or after October 23.

Unfortunately, as far as I know these daylight saving time rules are not

official, in that there's no official Palestinian government document

listing these rules for future years; however, tzdb must put *something*

in the database and that's the best guess we've come up with. If the

government could publish an official document stating what the rules are

for future years, we'd be happy to adjust tzdb to match that.

Of lesser importance is the English-language abbreviation used for

standard and daylight saving time in Palestine. (This is less important

because most timekeeping applications do not rely on these

abbreviations, as they are inherently ambiguous and somewhat deprecated

anyway.) Here, tzdb attempts to follow common practice, and it currently

uses the same longstanding abbreviations for time in Palestine that it

uses for Cyprus, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria - namely "EET" and

"EEDT" (short for "Eastern European Time" and "Eastern European Summer

Time"). I am unaware of any English-language use of the abbreviations

"PSST" and "PSDT" to refer to civil timekeeping in this area. However,

if these abbreviations become popular in common practice we should

change tzdb to incorporate them.