GENEVA, Nov 30 (Reuters) - Five Palestinian ambulances have entered service for the first time in East Jerusalem, following an agreement between Israeli authorities and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, officials said on Friday.

The United States immediately welcomed the breakthrough, reached at an international conference of the Red Cross, saying it hoped that its "cooperative spirit" would continue.

The ambulances are based at the Maternity Hospital in East Jerusalem, which is run by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. Israel captured East Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East war.

The two emergency services signed a memorandum of understanding in November 2005, pledging cooperation to improve access to conflict victims, but it has not been fully implemented amid security concerns and other issues.

The deal called for Palestinian Red Cross ambulances to be helped in humanitarian work, by easing their passage through checkpoints, between the Gaza Strip and West Bank or to Israeli hospitals, and their stationing in places including Jerusalem.

The weeklong conference in Geneva, which linked 186 Red Cross and Red Crescent national societies and 194 governments, unanimously adopted a resolution urging all sides to implement fully the two-year-old accord and report back by May 31, 2008.

The accord paved the way for Israel's Magen David Adom and the Palestinian Red Crescent to join the world's largest relief organisation in June 2006 after years of arduous negotiations.

"Since their entry into the movement in 2006, these two societies have worked together to strengthen humanitarian assistance for those in need and to build bridges between their peoples," the U.S. delegation, led by State Department legal adviser John Bellinger, said in a statement issued on Friday. (Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Jonathan Lynn)

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