A special envoy from Yasser Arafat urged India Wednesday to help break the impasse in the Middle East, where the Israeli military is besieging the Palestinian leader in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

Hani al-Hassan, who arrived in New Delhi over the weekend, met Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee

and urged him to lobby Israel to end the siege of Arafat it launched after a spate of suicide bombings.

Describing relations between Indians and Palestinians as brotherly, the envoy said the expectation from countries like India was "always more."

"We want India to play a role in the Middle East," al-Hassan said.