Removing a row from an Excel sheet with Apache POI HSSF

I'm using the Apache POi HSSF library to import info into my application. The problem is that the files have some extra/empty rows that need to be removed first before parsing.

There's not a HSSFSheet.removeRow( int rowNum ) method. Only removeRow( HSSFRow row ). The problem with this it that empty rows can't be removed. For example:

sheet.removeRow( sheet.getRow(rowNum) );

gives a NullPointerException on empty rows because getRow() returns null. Also, as I read on forums, removeRow() only erases the cell contents but the row is still there as an empty row.

Is there a way of removing rows (empty or not) without creating a whole new sheet without the rows that I want to remove?