Israel Home Front Ideas

A small collection of ideas I've jotted down for improving home front alerting in Israel (Pikud HaOref / פיקוד העורף), accumulated over the course of living through the two wars with Iran.

These suggestions are offered with humility and the deepest respect for the people at Pikud HaOref and the emergency services who have kept us safe. I'm not a defense professional — just a resident who has spent a lot of time in a mamad, thinking about small UX and communication improvements that might help others. Ideas are shared in good faith, with no claim to expertise, and in the hope that even one might be useful.

Download

• English PDF
• Hebrew PDF / גרסה עברית

Historical snapshots are kept in releases/ by date.

How this repo is organised

Ideas are grouped into thematic sections. Each idea follows a simple template — Problem (what I noticed wasn't working) and Suggested solution (a rough sketch of what might help) — and is tagged with one or more categories:

Index of ideas

The official app (Pikud HaOref app)

#	Idea	Tags	Summary
1	Disable Android permission auto-reset and enable WEA extreme alerts		Walk users through two silent failure modes that currently break notification delivery.

Siren & alert delivery

#	Idea	Tags	Summary
2	Integrate HFC alerts with traffic light SCADA		Clear the roads and give motorists an in-band visual cue during alerts.

Information during and after an event

#	Idea	Tags	Summary
3	Distinct stand-down state for cancelled early warnings		Close the ambiguity loop with its own message variant.
4	Add a "current guidance" field to the alert feed		Make the standing instruction explicit instead of inferred.

Shelters & mamad logistics

#	Idea	Tags	Summary
5	Public shelter authority		National body, GIS register, viability code, inspection and enforcement.
6	Standard listing format and physical wayfinding		Machine-readable lists, precise coordinates, documented access routes.
7	Mandatory municipal shelter-finder app		Geolocated, accessible, photos/videos, single source of truth.
8	Communications redundancy in every public shelter		Cellular, Wi-Fi, hardened WEA tablet, and AM/FM radio in every shelter.
9	Long-stay amenities — fewer but better-equipped shelters		Mattresses, earplugs, AC, and the explicit trade-off.

Data, APIs & developer ecosystem

#	Idea	Tags	Summary
10	Provide a public and documented API		Replace the scraper sprawl with a professionally managed source of truth.
11	Formally model the alert payload schema		Derive a canonical JSON Schema from observed traffic.
12	Observed payload schema (v0)		Empirical model from a live capture, kicking off the formal-model effort.
13	Official multilingual area names + stable area IDs		Kill the per-app translation tables that break for non-Hebrew speakers.

Sections with no ideas yet: Accessibility & inclusion, Miscellaneous.

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Ideas: Daniel Rosehill. Documentation / Reformatting / Repo: Claude Code (Opus 4.6).