'Arafat more serious obstacle than Yassin'

"Yasser Arafat and his gang of terrorists who came from Tunis (their base before their 1994 return to the Palestinian territories) represent a more serious obstacle than Hamas and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin," said Naveh.

The minister, who is member of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's right-wing Likud party, also made a new call for Arafat's expulsion from his headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah where the 74-year-old has been effectively confined to house arrest for more than two years.

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"His expulsion is important, for he continues to transfer funds to the terror organisations and encourages attacks by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades," he said in reference to a radical offshoot of Arafat's Fatah movement.

In an interview with the Haaretz daily on Friday, Sharon hinted that both Arafat and the head of the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, might be in Israel's sights.

"I wouldn't suggest either of them (Arafat and Nasrallah) feels immune.... Anyone who kills a Jew or harms an Israeli citizen, or sends people to kill Jews, is a marked man, period," he said in one of his most threatening remarks to date.

The debate about the fate of Arafat has come back into the spotlight after the wheelchair-bound Yassin was assassinated in an Israeli air strike nearly two weeks ago in Gaza City.

Meanwhile, Israeli security forces were on a high state of alert Sunday ahead of the week-long Passover holiday, with extra troops being deployed around Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the police and army said.

The move follows the killing of a Jewish resident of the northern West Bank settlement of Avnei Hefetz in the early hours of Saturday, carried out by a member of the radical Hamas movement. The attacker was himself shot dead.