Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, has urged Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, "to get rid of" Avigdor Lieberman, Netanyahu's far-right foreign minister, Israeli media have reported.

Sarkozy's office had no immediate comment on the remarks quoted in Israeli newspapers and on the country's Channel 2 television station.

"You must get rid of this person," the Haaretz newspaper and Ynet website quoted Sarkozy as telling Netanyahu during his talks with him last Wednesday in Paris.

Netanyahu's office issued a statement saying "in light of the latest media reports," the prime minister voiced his "full confidence" in Lieberman during a meeting with ambassadors from European Union countries.

'Intolerable' meddling

The reports said Sarkozy compared Lieberman, accused of racism by many Palestinian-Israeli politicians, with Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French far-right politician, but retracted the remark after Netanyahu countered that the foreign minister left a different impression in private conversations.

A spokesman for Lieberman, leader of the ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beitenu party, said that if Sarkozy made the comments, they would amount to "intolerable" meddling in Israeli affairs.

Lieberman has angered Israel's Arab minority by questioning their loyalty to Israel and suggesting some of their towns be ceded to Palestinian jurisdiction in exchange for Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The reports about Sarkozy's purported remarks put a spotlight on a rift between Israel and the West over Netanyahu's rejection of calls for a total halt to Jewish settlement building.

Lieberman, himself a settler, has said settlements are no obstacle to peace.