Israel's foreign minister said Israeli leaders, holding an emergency session Thursday after two suicide bombings, should ignore U.S. objections and expel Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.

"We are now in a situation that if we ask for such permission (from Washington), it will be virtually impossible to get it," Silvan Shalom told Army Radio.

"But sometimes, there are situations where you have to make decisions independent of outside influence."

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, cutting short a trip to India after 15 Israelis were killed in suicide bombings in Jerusalem and near Tel Aviv Tuesday, prepared to consult his security cabinet on further military moves against Palestinian militants.

Wednesday an Israeli warplane narrowly failed to assassinate Mahmoud al-Zahar, a leader of the Hamas group that claimed responsibility for the two bombings, but killed his son and a bodyguard in a missile strike on his home in Gaza.

The wave of tit-for-tat violence has drowned a U.S.-backed peace plan in blood.

Trying to defuse a political crisis amid the violence, Palestinian parliament speaker Ahmed Qurie said he had accepted Arafat's nomination to become prime minister in place of Mahmoud Abbas, a moderate who resigned Saturday.

Qurie planned to meet the Palestine Liberation Organization's policy-making executive committee Thursday to discuss candidates for a scaled-down emergency cabinet of six to eight members.

He has called on Israelis and Palestinians to end violence that has clouded his chances of renewing dialogue with Sharon over the peace "road map," which envisions reciprocal confidence-building steps and a Palestinian state by 2005.

ARAFAT ACCUSED

Several members of Sharon's security cabinet said they would raise the issue of Arafat's expulsion from the Palestinian territories.

"If it is brought today for a vote, the result, in my opinion, will be in favor (of the expulsion)," Shalom said on Israel Radio. But he added: "I am not sure this will be decided today at all."

Israel and the United States have accused Arafat, a symbol of the Palestinian struggle for statehood, of encouraging violence in a three-year-old uprising for independence.

The 74-year-old leader, effectively confined by Israeli military roadblocks to his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah for the past two years, denies the allegations.

Israeli Vice Premier Ehud Olmert said Wednesday a better alternative to expulsion would be to put Arafat in "solitary confinement" in his battered compound, cutting him off from the outside world.

The proposal calls for the compound to be encircled again with tanks, phone lines cut, mobile phones jammed and no one allowed in.

Sharon has repeatedly turned down calls to expel Arafat, fearing an international backlash and a rift with the United States, Israel's main ally.

Some Israeli security officials have opposed expulsion, arguing Arafat would win international sympathy and could still control Palestinian security forces from afar. But Shalom said his departure would encourage the emergence of "more moderate (Palestinian) forces."

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