The Israeli Openstreetmap (OSM) community worked ½ year with the Israel officials to get some kind of official license free data from the Government that can be imported to OSM without restriction.
Today we achieved the first goal and got the first official recourse.

The Israel Ministry of Interior provided an up-to-date (August 2010) rasterized image of the current administrative boundaries of the Israeli country. This is the first official data without restrictions that is provided to the OSM project from the State of Israel.

The high resolution image includes important data about the administrative borders and the districts, so it should be easy to trace the borders within the OSM tools. OSM Israel is currently evaluating a way to import / trace those data into OSM.

Members of the OSM Israel community will also present Openstreetmap to the government GIS forum in Israel expecting even more support by Israel’s officials in the future.

About Openstreetmaps in Israel:
Starting 2008 OSM in Israel included only some streets around Tel Aviv and some highways.
Starting 2009 you could already use Openstreetmap for orientation around the country.
In 2010 you could finally use Openstreetmap for navigation as all important connections between the cities where available.
Especially the Bing sat-images helped to push the amount of streets to a higher level and provided even more mappers that helped.