a new dedicated center will be opened next week for the issuance of temporary passports

Ahead of a discussion to be held Wednesday in the Knesset's Interior Committee on the lack of queues at the Population Authority last year, the PA announced that a new dedicated center will be opened next week that will add hundreds of queues a day for the issuance of temporary passports.
The temporary passport center will operate in the center of the country (near the Ayalon Mall, in Bnei Brak) and will be a center for anyone who has not had time to renew a passport before their expected trip. The center will issue temporary passports for a period of two years, at the same cost as a temporary passport at the bureau (NIS 435 for an adult and NIS 215 for a minor) - about half the cost at Ben Gurion Airport. Details of appointments and other relevant information will be published separately. 
The opening of the center is in addition to other measures, which they claim will be reflected in the coming weeks and will provide more available appointments. The Authority announced that a significant technological improvement was made this week and from now on every citizen will be asked to enter their identifying details only once to locate available queues in all the various lodges, instead of re-entering the identifying details for a search in each bureau. In addition, work is currently being done to further technological improvement, which will make it significantly easier to locate available appointments.
At the same time, as announced last week, the passport regulations have been amended and from now on, a temporary passport will be issued for two years instead of a year (at the bureau or Ben Gurion Airport), without changing current costs. Israelis will be allowed to enter and exit with a foreign passport, until January 2023.
The PA also announced that it will soon absorb about 100 more new employees to reinforce bureaus throughout the country. So far, about 20 have been recorded and the rest are expected to be recorded soon.
Without answering the huge queues, citizens have already managed to develop a bot that warns of available queues, open telegram groups that sell paid queues and the Ministry of the Interior has not yet managed to take over the huge demand of tens of thousands of Israelis for passport renewals. At the same time, according to the bot creator, the service stopped working due to a change made by the Ministry of the Interior in the system.
Meanwhile, until January 2023, the possibility for Israelis holding a foreign passport to enter and enter Israel using this passport was extended. What will someone who does not have a foreign passport do? Wait his turn or pay dearly.
Until July 2021, the average waiting time for a queue at population bureaus across the country was a few days - at most a week. Israelis used to make an appointment near the expiration date of their passport or ID card, but two years of Corona in which the bureaus were closed intermittently, combined with hundreds of thousands of Israelis wanting to fly abroad and their passports invalid, have made this task especially difficult. It was difficult, to the point of almost impossible, to make a quick appointment to renew a passport or ID card, because some bureaus did not have available appointments even for a few months ahead.
Three months after the plan to shorten queues was published, it has not yet borne fruit. The program includes additional audience reception hours, additional manpower and a more accessible app for scheduling appointments.
The reduction in load was supposed to be felt after Pesach, but so far only about 40 new employees have been recruited and the app is not ready yet, so the online appointment scheduling process is done in an outdated and inconvenient system, which requires a lot of identification until an appointment is made.
The Office of the Minister of the Interior, Ayelet Shaked, and the Director General of the Authority, Tomer Moskowitz, are aware of the failures and deal with the issue from morning to night, but explain that it is a time-consuming process. Queue to renew the passport, invented a bot that updates it automatically as soon as queues open.And there were also Israelis who chose another route and decided to sell or buy queues to paid offices.
The big concern in the Interior Ministry was that in about two years - then hundreds of thousands of identity cards of citizens without a biometric certificate are expected to expire and they will have to issue a new one - the number of referrals to bureaus will increase significantly. But the meager manpower that was in the offices at the time of the plague led to the postponement of many queues, which drained to a time when the world reopened and people returned to fly abroad.
The director general of the Population Authority, Tomer Moskowitz, said: "Israel, like many countries in the world, has been in a particularly challenging period when it comes to issuing passports. The management of the authority is constantly working to find solutions that will return the waiting time for the passport to the short times that were acceptable before the corona. The steps taken will enable an immediate response to very many passengers and we will continue tirelessly to seek additional solutions. "