I am giving Bet Guvrin the same rating as the community average, but I probably would have rated it higher if not for the abbreviated nature of my visit. A large part of that was my own faulty planning, but the park closure practices contributed to that significantly. 

In August of 2022, I was in Israel with the family on a Bat Mitzvah trip. Having seen every single other WH site in the country in the past, I could not put Bet Guvrin at the forefront of this particular trip's itinerary. I knew that the park likely required no less than 3 hours to see properly, but paring it down to just the main highlights looked like a reasonable bid to stay within the space of an hour and a half on one afternoon. In my experience, 90 minutes is a threshold that should not be exceeded when visiting as a group a place for which not everyone has the same degree of enthusiasm. What I failed to consider is that it could not be an hour and a half right before the closure.

The main sightseeing clusters at Bet Guvrin-Maresha National Park - marked as areas A, B, C, D - are connected by a circuit road that happens to run one way for a significant part (there are actual spikes across the road between lots B and C to ensure that no one drives against the directed flow). A full hour before the park closes, the gates to the initial stretch of the road are locked. You may be inside the park, but you can no longer navigate the full circuit in a car. You can instead use walking trails to get around, but at that point, there is no time to cover sufficient ground on foot.

The Bell Caves and the Apollophanes burial cave are in areas C and D. I had them as must-sees during preparations, so we went to those areas first. And then, when I thought we still had about 45 minutes to check out at least one another area, we were faced with a literal roadblock, unable to drive to either parking lot A or B. We did walk up one trail for about 15 minutes, which allowed us to see a single smaller columbarium at the edge of "area B" and enjoy a few panoramic views. And that was it. 

Furthermore, there is a separate area E of the park (across the highway) that includes a Roman amphitheater and a couple of Crusader sites. It wouldn't be part of this visit anyway, but it basically stops allowing people to get in at the same time as the main circuit road gets blocked for the night, at 4 pm, a full hour before the official park closure.

The Bell Caves are jaw-dropping and the Apollophanes Cave is a visual delight. I'll have to make sure to see the other parts of the park next time. It is only about an hour's drive from either Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.