What is protected, and who is prosecuted.

The phrase "Israel's protected-plants list" does a lot of quiet work, so it is worth starting with what the thing actually is.

It is a nature-protection scheme that Israeli authorities enforce inside present-day Israel and extend into the occupied West Bank through the Civil Administration, under military command. Where it reaches Palestinians in the occupied territory it reaches them as an instrument of an occupying power: written by a legislature they cannot vote for, administered by a military authority, and enforced against a population with no say in how it is drafted or applied.

International humanitarian law is specific about how much authority that is, and the actual text is more damning than any paraphrase:

• Hague Regulations 1907, Article 43. With the legitimate power's authority having passed into the occupant's hands, the occupant "shall take all the measures in his power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety, while respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country." The default is that existing law stays. The occupier's job is order and safety, not legislating.
• Hague Regulations 1907, Article 55. The occupier is "regarded only as administrator and usufructuary" of the territory's public property, including its agricultural land. A usufructuary may use a thing but must safeguard its capital — not appropriate or deplete it for the benefit of its own population.
• Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 64. New legislation is permitted only for three narrow purposes: the occupier's own security, its obligations under the Convention, or the orderly government of the territory. Regulating what an occupied population may gather from its own hillsides is not obviously any of the three.
• ICJ, July 2024. The International Court of Justice found Israel's continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory unlawful, together with the settlement regime, the annexation measures, and its use of the territory's natural resources.

Al-Haq and Adalah's term for the pattern that has developed instead is de facto annexation: the Knesset has, over decades, "increasingly extended its sovereign authority over the West Bank through legislative acts, in breach of its limited administrative authority as a belligerent occupant" (Al-Haq; Adalah).

An occupier's power to make rules over occupied land is legally exceptional, narrow and temporary by design. This is not a park by-law, and describing it as one is itself a political choice.

The protected-plants list runs to dozens of species. Among them are the plants that appear on a postcard: the anemone, the cyclamen, the narcissus, the iris, the wild orchids.

The stated purpose is conservation, and it should be said plainly that conservation is a real category and some of these plants have a real case. The wild orchids are the strongest example on this site: they are slow-growing, dependent on soil fungi, dug commercially for the salep trade, and measurably declining under that pressure across the eastern Mediterranean — with DNA evidence published in 2026 showing tuber sizes falling steadily across two centuries (see Record 07, Register 04).

Hold onto that, because it makes the next section sharper rather than softer. The question is not whether wild plants can need protecting. The question is what this particular instrument does.

Two separate bodies of documentation exist. They cover different windows and different instruments, and this record keeps them apart deliberately rather than adding them together into a bigger-sounding number.

The court record, 2004–2016. The lawyer and researcher Rabea Eghbariah examined Israeli court archives for this offence. Over that period the courts decided 61 cases concerning za'atar and akkoub, plus dozens more concerning sage. Every defendant was Palestinian. Across the same archive there is no indictment at all for picking anemone, narcissus or primrose — species that surveys show are picked (القدس العربي; Oxford Symposium).

The enforcement record, 2016–2018. Separately, the Palestinian legal centre Adalah documented 26 indictments and 151 fines in that three-year window, again falling on the population that has gathered these herbs for centuries (Adalah).

The three plants at the centre of both datasets:

A list that shields a flower nobody is punished for taking, while criminalising a herb only one people is punished for gathering, is not protecting plants. It is regulating a population's access to its own land.

Each March, ahead of the akkoub and za'atar season, the Israeli Nature and Parks Authority runs a public warning campaign. The campaign is timed to the harvest of the plants Palestinians eat.

In 2019 Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights, demanded that the designations be cancelled and criminal enforcement suspended. The argument was not that the enforcement was unkind. It was that the ban:

• lacked a reliable factual basis;
• did not serve the purpose of the law it was made under;
• and disproportionately harmed the Arab population that has used these herbs for hundreds of years.

The Nature and Parks Authority said it would revise its enforcement policy (Adalah).

A protection order carries an unstated premise: that without it, people would take until there was nothing left. It is worth setting against that what was actually in force here before any of these orders existed, because it was written down.

In 1924 Tawfiq Canaan published a long survey of Palestinian shrines, and in it he described the rules governing the trees growing at them. A fruit tree at a shrine — a mulberry, a fig, a vine, a prickly pear — was held to be سبيل sabil: anyone passing may eat as much as they choose, and nothing may be carried away. Most people said the fatiha before picking. Beyond that, no one would cut a branch, however small, and even broken or withered wood could not simply be taken — it could be burned only for a meal cooked in fulfilment of a vow (Canaan, JPOS 4, 1924, 35–36).

Sabil is the same word used for the public water cistern built beside the road and kept filled for whoever is thirsty, with a cup left there. One word covers both: what is set aside for the passer-by.

That is a harvest rule with a limit built into it, and it is not the only one Canaan recorded. The same body of work documents:

• Gleaning rights — صيافات sayyafat for olives and بعارات ba'arat for grain, with widows, orphans and the poor going first (Record 03).
• The blessing said over seed, which asks that the crop feed not only the household but the birds, the person who cuts ears without permission and eats, the guest, the weak and the hungry. The thief is named ahead of the guest (The Year, Register 04).

Three separate customs, all recorded before 1935, all doing the same thing: guaranteeing access to food to people who own nothing, while capping what any one person can remove.

The question a protected-plants order answers is how to stop people taking too much. It is not a new question here, and it already had an answer that did not require prosecuting anybody.

None of this is an argument that nothing is over-picked, and this record does not make one — the conservation case for some species is real and is set out on Record 07. It is an argument about who is presumed to need supervising. The orders were issued over a population that had a documented, functioning body of restraint, by an authority that did not consult it, and enforced against the three plants that population eats.

For the plants above, the instrument is a list and a fine. For the olive it is more direct: the trees are cut, burned, bulldozed and poisoned, and the people who own them are kept away from them. Figures documented by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which has recorded settler attacks in the occupied West Bank since 2006:

• After the 2023 harvest, more than 96,000 dunums of olive-cultivated land went unharvested because Israeli restrictions kept the farmers off it.
• Access to those areas had required “prior coordination”, a scheduled Israeli military permission, and in 2023 almost all of those approvals were cancelled, with the Barrier’s agricultural gates left overwhelmingly closed.
• The Food Security Sector put the loss at more than 1,200 metric tons of olive oil and US$10 million.
• By 10 December 2025, OCHA had documented over 1,700 settler attacks causing casualties or property damage that year across more than 270 communities — five a day — injuring 1,110 Palestinians.

Alongside the violence runs the access regime: groves behind the separation wall, beside a colony, or inside a closed military zone can be reached only with a permit, on designated days, for a set number of hours — leaving farmers unable to prune, plough or harvest properly (OCHA).

Read the two mechanisms together and they are the same mechanism. Gathering criminalised at one end, access severed at the other, and in the middle a population that cannot get to the hillside in the season the plant is up. As Record 06 puts it: you do not have to ban a plant to end the practice of gathering it. You only have to make the walk impossible for long enough.