When I fly internationally from Israel, I am routinely given a short interview by security personnel, in which I am asked several questions etc... Because of this, people generally recommend that passengers arrive to the airport 3 hours before their flight departs.
Is this the same for domestic flights from Tel Aviv to Eilat on Israir? Or is this procedure generally only in place for international flights?
Yes, security interview is done on all domestic Israeli flights as well as all outbound flights and inbound Israeli flights.
To the best of my knowledge, and from my experience there is no difference in the interview and security check between international and domestic flights. With the only difference is that (at least for Israeli citizens) a passport isn't required and other forms of identification can be used, like a driver's licence or an id card.
But, as @Zach Lipton noted in their comment, the entire pre flight process is shorter, so passengers are advised to come only 1-1:30 hours before the flight and not 3 as in International flights:
Arkia(Hebrew site):
מועדי התייצבות בשדה התעופה לפני מועד הטיסה:
בנתב"ג ובאילת- 1:30 שעות לפני מועד הטיסה.
בשדה דב ובחיפה- 1:15 שעות לפני מועד הטיסה.
My translation:
Arrival times to the airport before the departure times:
Ben Gution and Eilat - 1:30 hours before departure.
Sde Dov and Haifa - 1:15 hours before departure.
Israir(English site):
Domestic flights from Ben Gurion Airport depart from Terminal 1.
For flights on jet (ô"à) aircraft passengers should come to the airport an hour and a half before takeoff.ֿ
For flights on ATR (ô"à) aircraft passengers should come to the airport an hour before takeoff.
Yes, you can get interviewed both for domestic and international trips. Source: it happened to me when I was flying from Eilat to Budapest via Tel Aviv.
But, if you are worried about this because of the time it takes then there's a lot more that happened to me on that day: I was strip searched at the Eilat airport before boarding to Ben Gurion and they repeated the same thing the same darned day at Ben Gurion. I was sitting on a stool in my underwear while they screened my clothing. And they took out and investigated every. single. thing. in my suitcase. This easily takes two-three hours, depending on how much stuff you have.
Next time I took the bus to Eilat :D and took a flight home from Amman, Jordan (although by the time this happened home moved from Budapest to Vancouver, hurray!).
