For the players and the fans packed into the first Palestinian football stadium on Sunday, the venue meant much more than a home-field advantage.

“This is a declaration on an international and somewhat official level that we have a home, and it is Palestine. We are watching players who are refugees from other countries, players who come from the West Bank and from Gaza, all unite together to win,” said Mohamad Salhab, 17, a fan who had travelled for four hours through West Bank checkpoints to watch the Palestinian national team play their first home match in al-Ram, a town near Jerusalem.

The game against Jordan, which ended in a 1-1 draw, came at a particularly precarious time for Palestinian politics as senior leaders from the two feuding Palestinian authorities debated an Egyptian-brokered proposal for a reconciliation.

The Fatah forces under Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, have engaged in frequent clashes with the Islamist Hamas party since June last year, when Hamas forces seized control of the Gaza Strip. Egypt has invited Hamas and Fatah to meet in Cairo on November 9 for talks to restore Palestinian unity, creating a new spirit of nationalism that was echoed on the football field at the weekend.

“We are here to realise a dream, that is the national team of Palestine playing in its own stadium,” said Sepp Blatter, president of Fifa, football's governing body, which oversaw the $4million (£2.5million) stadium renovation for the historic match. Watching from his home in the Gaza Strip, Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas government, said that the game could “pave the road to restoring the internal Palestinian relations and bring them back on track”.

It did not seem to matter to the 8,000-plus fans who crammed into the 6,500-seat stadium that the Palestinian goal was scored by Ahmed Kashkash, 22, one of the team's five Gazan players. “I don't care if he is Hamas or Fatah or Mickey Mouse. He kicks into the goal with a good foot. This is all I care about,” Mohamad Salhab said. Kashkash, who described his goal as “one of the most emotional moments of my life”, added that he wished only that his family and friends from Gaza had been able to attend the game.

Arranging for the Gaza players to enter the West Bank for the match required months of negotiations with Israeli authorities, and several barely managed to arrive for the group's only full practice two days before the game.

“We are the only national football team without a recognised nation. Playing at ‘home' for us meant playing in Jordan, or another country. It was another insult, another reminder that we were still living without a state,” Rami Rabi, who came from Serbia to play for the team, said.

The crowd tried many chants before settling on a tribute to the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. “Football is more noble than war!”

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