The US has won an agreement to transfer up to 17 Chinese Muslims from the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to Palau, a sparsely populated archipelago in the North Pacific, according to a statement released by Palau on Wednesday.

Palau President Johnson Toribiong said his Government had “agreed to accommodate the United States of America’s request” to “temporarily resettle” the detainees, members of the Uighur ethnic group, “subject to periodic review”. Palau, the President said, would be “honoured and proud” to take them in a “humanitarian gesture”.

The agreement opens the door to the largest single transfer of Guantánamo prisoners and is the first major deal on detainees since President Obama pledged soon after taking office in January to close the prison within a year.

The 17 Uighurs have been in a state of limbo since fall, when a federal district court ordered that they be released in the US and an appeals court overturned the ruling. The Bush administration said that it did not classify the men as enemy combatants.

But the US had not been able to persuade any country to take them, despite contacting about 100 Governments. Washington had said it would not hand them over to China, which has demanded their return, because it feared they would be persecuted or even executed.

The Chinese Government accuses some Uighurs of leading an Islamic separatist movement in far western China, and Beijing has pressed many countries not to accept the detainees. Palau, which was a US trust territory until its independence in 1994, maintains diplomatic relations with Taiwan rather than China, making it less vulnerable to pressure from Beijing.