Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said today that he and US President George W Bush agreed to shun the incoming Palestinian unity government unless it accepted international demands on policy towards Israel.
Mr Olmert made the remarks ahead of talks later in the day with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was also due to see Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas before a summit with both leaders in Jerusalem tomorrow.
Last week Mr Abbas and the Islamist movement Hamas agreed to form a unity adminstration but Hamas insisted it would not recognise Israel, renounce violence or abide by existing interim peace accords.
The deal fell short of meeting the conditions set by the international Quartet, of the EU, US, Russia and the United Nations.
"I spoke about this on Friday with the President of the United States, and I can tell you the Israeli and U.S. positions are completely identical," Mr Olmert said at the start of the weekly Israeli cabinet meeting.
"A Palestinian government that does not accept the Quartet's conditions, cannot receive recognition and there will not be cooperation with it," Mr Olmert said in broadcast remarks.
Starting a round of meetings with talks with Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz, Ms Rice was asked whether there was agreement to boycott a unity government.
She did not respond, although she said yesterday such a decision had not yet been made.
"We are not going to render judgement [on a future unity government]," Rice's spokesman, Sean McCormack, said.
But he made clear Washington was looking for a Palestinian government that fulfilled the conditions laid down by the international peace brokers.
Rice has said she would like tomorrow's trilateral meeting to start looking at core issues ultimately leading to two states living side by side.
While publicly supportive of Mr Abbas, a moderate whose Fatah faction was defeated by Hamas in an election a year ago, US officials are becoming impatient with the Palestinian president, whose staff said he would not budge from the deal.
Senior Palestinian officials said Mr Abbas was angry about the cool response to the deal. One source said Mr Abbas said the internal pressure "unbearable" and that only alternative to the agreement "is civil war".