by Chris Otton
JERUSALEM, Sept 14 (AFP) - Israeli ministers approved a compensation package Tuesday for settlers due to be uprooted from their homes as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon rejected calls to submit his Gaza pullout plan to a referendum.
Sharon's security cabinet, comprised of his most senior ministers, voted nine to one for the plan which could see some families eventually receive up to 500,000 dollars.
While sources described the atmosphere at the meeting as stormy, it represents the first concrete step towards the implementation of the so-called disengagement plan which should see all 8,000 of the Gaza settlers and residents of four remote Jewish enclaves in the West Bank evacuated next year.
The sole dissenter was Welfare Minister Zevulun Orlev, a member of the far-right National Religious Party, the political mouthpiece of the settler movement.
Sharon said last month that he expected his full cabinet to vote on a final version of the plan on October 24 before parliament has its say on November 3.
The vote at the security cabinet is another sign of Sharon's apparent determination to forge ahead with the project which has split his party and alienated his traditional supporters among the settlers.
Tens of thousands demonstrated against the pullout on Sunday night while his powerful Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has urged him to be submit the plan to a national refernedum.
However Sharon said in a series of interviews published Tuesday that there was simply no time to hold a nationwide poll.
"The disengagement plan will be implemented without delay, according to the dates that were set. Were a referendum not to delay the process at all I might be able to consider it, but that isn't the situation.," Sharon told the Maariv daily.
The premier also took a swipe at Netanyahu, his chief rival within the main governing Likud party, without mentioning him by name.
"Regretfully, there are people who are trying to torpedo and to delay the implementation of the plan, and who are motivated by foreign interests."
Sharon also had a go at his arch enemy Yasser Arafat, insisting that the Palestinian leader's days in the West Bank are numbered and warning that he would be dealt with in the same way as two assassinated heads of Hamas.
In an interview with the top-selling Yediot Aharonot published a year after the security cabinet approved in principle of Arafat's "removal", Sharon insisted that the 75-year-old would be banished "at a time that suits us."
"We took action against (Sheikh) Ahmed Yassin and (Abdelaziz) Rantissi and a few other murderers when we thought the time was right. On the matter of Arafat's expulsion we will operate in keeping with that same principle: we'll do it at a time that suits us," he told the daily.
Sharon has made a number of previous threats against Arafat's life but any move to either expel or assassinate the Palestinian leader would be fiercely opposed by Washington.
However Palestinian negotiations minister Saeb Erakat said that the threats were being taken seriously, likening Sharon and his cabinet to the mafia.
"These kind of threats are very serious and are preparing the ground for a physical attack on president Arafat," Erakat told AFP.
In events on the ground, at least two Israeli soldiers were wounded when a bicycling Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up in the north of the West Bank.
The attack, which was claimed by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, took place between the town of Qalqilya and the nearby village of Habla, which are linked by a tunnel.
Palestinian security sources said that two Palestinians were also wounded in the attack.
In a phone call to AFP's offices in the main northern West Bank city of Nablus, an anonymous caller said the attack had been carried out by a member of the Brigades which is an armed offshoot of Arafat's Fatah movement.