West Bank, March 7, 2010 (Pal Telegraph) - Hamas and Fatah members imprisoned in an Israeli jail declared reconciliation Saturday as a symbolic step to urge their leaders to bury the hatchet as well.

The detainees signed the deal at Ofar prison near the West Bank city of Ramallah, according to a statement of a Palestinian prisoners' rights group sent to the media.

The key achievement of the agreement is that prisoners from the two factions will share rooms again, the Prisoners Studies Center said, adding that Hamas and Fatah prisoners stopped living in the same rooms when Hamas seized control of Gaza in mid-2007.

The statement said efforts are underway to achieve similar agreements in all Israeli prisons and detention facilities, where Israel holds more than 8,000 Palestinians.
The prisoners confirmed that the action comes in the wake of Israel's announcement that it would put two Muslim mosques on its list of national historic sites. It is time for Palestinians to be united, they said.

Since February 2009, Egypt has brokered several rounds of reconciliation talks in Cairo between Fatah and Hamas to heal the rift, but they have yielded little tangible results.