Is there akkoub in Gaza?

The published sources do not settle it. The 2022 checklist of Palestine's native plants, compiled by Palestinian botanists in Nablus, rates akkoub as common in the Gaza Strip. The sources that can be checked one record at a time do not show it there.

On 26 September 2026 the Global Biodiversity Information Facility held 635 records of Gundelia tournefortii inside the West Bank and none inside the Gaza Strip. iNaturalist held 78 and none. The nearest GBIF record lies a little over two kilometres east of Gaza's boundary.

This record has also found no published source that puts akkoub in a Gaza market, a Gaza kitchen or a Gaza recipe. That is an absence of evidence, and it is stated here as that. It is not proof that akkoub does not grow in Gaza, or that nobody there eats it.

The national list of Palestine's wild plants is the 2022 checklist by Mohammed Ali-Shtayeh, Rana Jamous and Salam Abuzaitoun of the Biodiversity and Environmental Research Center in Til, near Nablus. It gives every native plant a rating in each of Palestine's plant districts, from very common to very rare.

Akkoub is rated in every district but the Dead Sea valley, and in the Gaza Strip it is rated common (Ali-Shtayeh, Jamous and Abuzaitoun, 2022, supplementary data). The same row gives its Arabic names as عكوب and كعوب, and its habitats as batha and shrub-steppe, the low, dry, stony scrub where it grows in the West Bank.

The rating comes with a caveat the paper states itself. District ratings were taken from the places named on herbarium labels and in the published literature. The two specimens cited for akkoub are both held in Nablus, and nothing in the row points to a specimen collected in Gaza. The Gaza rating may come from older regional floras rather than from anyone finding the plant there recently.

The two open databases of plant sightings let anyone count the records inside a boundary. This record ran the counts on 26 September 2026 against the administrative outlines of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

• 635 GBIF records of akkoub inside the West Bank
• 0 GBIF records inside the Gaza Strip
• 78 iNaturalist observations in the West Bank, and 0 in Gaza
• about 2 km: how far the nearest GBIF record lies east of Gaza's boundary

A zero from Gaza does not mean much on its own. GBIF holds 1,115 plant records of any species from the whole Strip, and iNaturalist 14. 821 of GBIF's Gaza records come from one older database that has no akkoub records anywhere, so its silence on Gaza tells us nothing about this plant.

The West Bank count has its own bias. 553 of the 635 records come from the observations dataset of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, the body that enforces the ban on picking akkoub (GBIF, West Bank query). How that enforcement works is set out on Under the Law.

Three surveys made inside the Strip by botanists at Gaza's universities were read in full for this page. None of them lists akkoub.

• Wadi Gaza, spring 2004. Abdel Fattah Abd Rabou and colleagues recorded 70 species in 32 families, with their uses. Fourteen are in the daisy family, among them milk thistle and golden thistle. Akkoub is not one of them (Abd Rabou et al., 2008).
• Wadi Gaza, March to September 2007. Mohammed Abou Auda and colleagues sampled nine plots over 24 field trips. Their species table has six thistles and no akkoub (Abou Auda et al., 2009).
• Gaza's herbal markets, published 2023. A survey of twenty markets and herbalists from Jabalia to Rafah documented 72 species on sale. Akkoub is not among them. The authors note that most of what is sold is imported (Abou Auda, Elbashiti and Alghuff, 2023).

None of these settles it either. Wadi Gaza is a valley floor and wetland, and the checklist gives akkoub's habitats as batha and shrub-steppe, so the two Wadi Gaza surveys say nothing about the rest of the Strip. The market survey was about medicinal plants, not food.

The wild plant reported as Gaza's famine food is khubeza, mallow. None of the reporting read for this page mentions akkoub. Raya Ziada of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung's Palestine office, a founder of the Palestinian Agro-Ecological Forum, puts it directly: “Malva, khobeiza in Arabic, became the plant most associated with surviving the famine” (Ziada, 2026). She mentions akkoub only for its criminalisation in the West Bank.

Reporting from inside the Strip says the same. In February 2024 Al Jazeera described families in Jabalia living on water and khubeza (al-Banna, 2024). A month later Maryam Al-Attar, in the same camp, told Reuters that they had never eaten khubeza before, even during earlier wars (Reuters, 2024). In August 2025 the UN agencies confirmed famine in Gaza (WHO, FAO, UNICEF and WFP, 2025).

What khubeza is, and how it became Gaza's famine food, is on the khubeza page.

Whether akkoub grows in Gaza may not be answerable now. In August 2026 FAO reported that on 24 June only 448 hectares of the Strip's cropland, about 3%, were both undamaged and accessible, and put the recent loss of access mainly down to the westward expansion of the “Yellow Line” (FAO, 2026). The authors of the checklist have since said that updating Gaza's flora is “currently unfeasible” (Ali-Shtayeh, AbuZaitoun and Jamous, 2026). The last count that included Gaza recorded two thirds of Palestine's native plants there, and 140 found nowhere else in the country. That count is on the flora of Palestine.