Meanwhile, the UN urged Friday, August 27, Israel to comply with its obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention and other related agreements which provide the protection for prisoners and civilians during the wartime.

"The UN agencies and offices remind Israel of its obligations under the fourth Geneva Convention and relevant international human rights instruments which provide for the protection of detainees and prisoners," UN Middle East peace envoy Terje Roed-Larsen said in a statement.

The human rights groups and Israeli Arab organizations, for their part, had urged the Israeli government to improve the conditions of the Palestinian detainees in the Israeli jails.

Israeli lawyer Lea Tsemel, who recently visited Beer Sheva prison in the south of the country, said the Israeli hospitals no longer offer medical treatment to the sick Palestinian strikers.

"The sick prisoners are locked in a room, tempted with food for five hours and, if they refuse to eat, returned to their cells without treatment," AFP quoted Tsemel as saying.

Hannah Friedman, executive director of the public committee against torture in Israel, said her organization had lodged a complaint with the prison authorities about water stoppage in the Beer Sheva prison.

"Israel is in complete violation of the international conventions it has signed regarding prisoners' rights," she added.

The Palestinian prisoners had appealed Thursday for the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and world human rights groups to interfere to prevent their hunger strike from turning into a "humanitarian disaster."

"We ask human rights organizations all around the world, and especially the UN, represented by its Secretary General Kofi Annan, to take a stand and help us end the miserable circumstances we are living," a spokesman for prisoners at a military-run detention center in the southern Negev desert told AFP by phone.

"We ask you to assume the legal and ethical responsibility by taking a quick and effective action to prevent a humanitarian disaster," he added.

The prisoners said the intolerable practices of the Israeli jail authorities had pushed them to go on their "empty stomach" battle to protest the Israeli procedures.

"The unbearable treatment had pushed us to go on this hunger strike after all our tries to obtain a change had failed and the prisons' administration had refused to respond to our simple needs as human beings," the spokesman said.

"We ask the Israelis to respect our dignity, improve our conditions and allow family visits, stop the naked searching policy, the solitary confinement policy for a huge number of prisoners, improve the food quality and quantity and improve health care".

The Egyptian foreign minister Ahmed Abul Gheit had also urged the international community to intervene to end the plight of the Palestinian prisoners in the Israeli jails.

"The world community should step in to end the sufferings and the maltreatment of prisoners in Israeli jails," Abul Gheit told reporters.

Abul Gheit expressed Egypt' s concern over the status of the Palestinian prisoners who have been on hunger strike 13 days running.