Israel's prison's service commissioner Aharon Franko met with jailed Palestinian security prisoners and promised a response soon to the demands of inmates who launched a mass hunger strike two weeks ago, the Palestinian Prisoners Affairs Ministry said Monday, DPA reported.
Aharon Franco told jailed Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti and four other prisoners in Hadarim Prison, north of Tel Aviv, that a committee which looked into the demands had finished its work, and would present its recommendations in 10 days time, the ministry said.
A spokeswoman for the Israel Prisons Service (IPS) confirmed that a senior IPS official had met with inmates during a tour of the prison, but gave no details of what had been discussed.
Some 1,350 of the more than 4,000 Palestinians in Israel jails are currently on a hunger strike. They began on April 17.
The protesters are demanding a series of concessions, including: an end to searches of visiting family members; an end to the use of solitary confinement; and an end to administrative detention - a provision that allows Israel to jail suspect militants for extendable periods of six months, without trial and based on classified intelligence information shown only to a military judge.
Israeli prisons have been plagued by hunger strikes since the winter, when a detainee of the radical Islamic Jihad movement, Khader Adnan, survived without food for 66 days and succeeded in advancing his release date by three weeks.