The Israeli Prime Minister's 19-year-old son posted disparaging comments about Arabs and Muslims on his Facebook page, an Israeli paper reported yesterday.

Earlier this year, Yair Netanyahu posted that Muslims "celebrate hate and death," the Haaretz daily said. After Palestinian assailants entered a West Bank settlement and stabbed five members of an Israeli family to death, he wrote that "terror has a religion and it is Islam".

Yair Netanyahu, the eldest of Benjamin Netanyahu's two sons, is currently a soldier in the Israeli military's media liaison unit. A lawyer for the Netanyahu family, David Shimron, said the comments were those of a "teenager" and were "taken out of context in an attempt to defame the Prime Minister and his family".