JERUSALEM (AFP) - Defence Minister Ehud Barak on Sunday severed ties between the Israeli army and a Jewish seminary accused of inciting its students to rebel during their military service.

The rare step against the "Har Bracha" yeshiva comes following a spate of incidents in which soldiers publicly held up banners vowing to refuse to take part in any future evacuation of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The soldiers came from Jewish seminaries, or yeshivas, where students combine military service with religious study.

"Defence Minister Barak views every incident of refusing orders as very serious and is not willing to accept any deviation from what he has defined as a red line," Barak's office said in a statement.

Barak took the decision after the head of the Har Bracha yeshiva, Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, failed to attend a planned meeting with Barak on Sunday to clarify his views.

Rabbis of the other yeshivas which participate in the military service combined with studies programme had condemned the incidents, but Melamed had refused to take a public stand.

The statement said Har Bracha students who wished to continue the programme would be given time to join another institution.

In the past, right-wing rabbis have been accused of urging their students to refuse orders to evacuate settlements on religious grounds.

Many religious Jews believe that God gave all of the biblical Land of Israel to the Jewish people.

In the past two months, six soldiers have been sentenced to prison and two to other punitive measures for publicly vowing not to evacuate settlements if ordered to do so.

The issue of Jewish settlements is one of the thorniest in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the main stumbling block in stalled US efforts to restart peace negotiations.

Settlement outposts built without government authorisation are considered illegal under Israeli law. The international community considers all Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land illegal.