DAMASCUS -- A Palestinian group warned Wednesday that the arrest of its leader by the Palestinian police would lead to "total political confrontation" with the Palestinian Authority, while Hamas and Islamic Jihad threatened more attacks on Israel, AFP reported.

At the same time, other Islamic groups were mulling their response.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), one of the three main components of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), warned here that the arrest Tuesday of Ahmed Saadat in the West Bank town of Ramallah would provoke a break with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's authority.

"The Palestinian Authority must realize that the arrest will put it in a situation of complete political confrontation with all nationalist and Islamic Palestinian forces, without exception, and with the Palestinian people in its entirety," the Movement said in a statement from its base here.

Israel had demanded Saadat's arrest since the PFLP claimed the October assassination of an Israeli cabinet minister, setting that as a condition for lifting the blockade that has bunkered Arafat in his Ramallah headquarters for six weeks.

Meanwhile, the two main Palestinian Islamist Movements responded to Saadat's arrest by threatening more attacks against Israel.

"The will of our people will express its refusal at these repressive measures (the arrest of Saadat), intensifying its resistance and responding to the occupation forces of the Zionist occupation forces," the Secretary General of Islamic Jihad, Ramadan Abdallah Shallah, told the press in Damascus.

For his part, Khaled Meshaal, director of the Hamas political bureau said "the rifles of the Palestinian people will remain pointed at the Zionist occupation; the forces of our people have a legitimate right to resist."

And PFLP spokesman Maher Taher called on Palestinians in and outside the occupied territories, as well as Israeli Arabs, to demonstrate against Saadat's arrest.