Daylight saving time ends overnight in Israel

Israel ended daylight saving time at 2 a.m. overnight Saturday-Sunday, setting the clocks back an hour to 1 a.m.

The period of reduced daylight hours will last until March 25, 2016.

The Palestinian Authority and the Gaza Strip ended daylight saving time on Friday.

Jordan and Syria will set their clocks back an hour at midnight early next Friday morning, a week after Israel, the West Bank and Gaza and most of Europe.

Last year, Israelis found their morning routine slightly askew after a computer glitch caused their clocks to be set back an hour overnight during the October end to daylight saving time.

Local cellphone providers tried to preempt a repeat of the problem by sending text messages to their users last week advising them to set their phones to Athens time, which also has October 25 as the start of winter time.

In 2013, the Knesset passed legislation extending daylight saving time until the end of October. Before that, standard time would begin the Saturday night before the Jewish High Holiday of Yom Kippur, so that the day’s fast, which is pegged to nightfall, would end an hour earlier.

Because the Hebrew calendar is lunar, Yom Kippur can fall between mid-September and mid-October, which used to mean that Israelis returned to standard time as much as a month and a half before most other countries, where daylight saving time ends in late October or early November. As a result, the issue of the seasonal time transition became contentious among Israelis, and was caught up in political tensions between religious and secular politicians.

Religious parties generally pushed for the early time change to ease the Yom Kippur fast, and some secular activists protested that the change was unnecessarily inconvenient and expensive. They pointed to a relatively early loss of daylight hours and a resultant rise in electricity bills as well as car accidents as people who would otherwise drive home from work in daylight were forced to drive in darkness.