U.S. officials dispute Olmert's claims

WASHINGTON, Jan. 13 (UPI) -- Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's claim that he got the U.S. government to abstain on a U.N. measure on the Gaza crisis was untrue, officials said.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Olmert's story of his conversation with U.S. President George Bush was "just 100 percent, totally, completely not true." White House Spokesman Tony Fratto said "there are inaccuracies" in what Olmert said.

During a speech Monday, the prime minister said he convinced Bush to tell U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice not to support the Gaza resolution she had prepared. Olmert said he made an emergency call to the president.

"I said: 'Get me President Bush on the phone,'" Olmert said. "They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn't care: 'I need to talk to him now.' He got off the podium and spoke to me."

McCormack said Rice had decided as early as Wednesday that she would not veto a resolution, after Arab ministers rejected an American effort to push for a weaker statement from the U.N. Security Council.

"So you have two possibilities left: voting for it or abstaining, and she decided, given where the state of the negotiations were in terms of the Mubarak initiative, that abstaining would give the best possibility for those negotiations to move forward and actually resolve the situation on the ground," McCormack said.