Ok, that question is unfair. Obviously, a party CAN file a patent application in Israel that claims priority from a PCT application, as opposed to being the national phase of that PCT application (and/or in addition to being the national phase of a different PCT application). A PCT application, after all, is really a patent application that has been simultaneously filed in all PCT member states, all of which are also Paris Convention signatories. Since a party can claim priority from an application filed in any of those states, it follows that it can claim priority from a PCT application.
Unfortunately, this fact may have escaped the attention of the people who designed the Israel PTO’s electronic filing system. To wit: this week I nationalized a PCT in Israel. The PCT application had two priority claims, one from an application filed in country X, and the second from another PCT application filed at the receiving office in country Y.
When Israel switched to electronic patent filing in June 2016, it eliminated the equivalent of an application data sheet that you can fill in on your computer before filing (expect for pro se inventors). The ILPTO’s electronic filing system requires filling in a series of fields online. The field for priority claims asks for a priority number and date, as well as the country of the priority application. There’s a drop-down list of countries, listed in alphabetical order as spelled in Hebrew. But conspicuously absent from the list is the Hebrew equivalent of “PCT” or “WO”.
Curiously, one of the jurisdictions that is listed in the drop-down list is the PCT International Bureau. This is curious because the IB can only be used as a receiving office for filing PCT applications; there’s no such thing as a patent application with filed the IB that’s not a PCT.
The facts suggest two possible explanations. The first is that the person who designed the IL-EFS didn’t understand that a PCT application is a PCT application regardless of the receiving office used, and thus expected applicants claiming priority from a PCT application to list the PCT receiving office as the country. That would explain why there’s an entry for the IB, but no listing for PCT or WO. The second possibility is that the person who designed the system understood that a PCT application is a PCT application, but instead of listing “PCT” or “WO”, listed “IB”. This could be because this was an oversight, or because the person didn’t understand the subtle difference between “IB” and “PCT/WO”.
In my case, I listed the PCT priority application number and filing date, and chose country Y as the country, and that is what is shown on the filing receipt. I have since contacted the powers-that-be at the ILPTO about this, and asked them to correct my filing receipt to show WO or PCT as the country for that priority application, and to fix the system itself to allow the selection of PCT/WO as the filing country. We’ll see how they address the issues.