Iran Says Israel Understands Combat, Not Dialogue.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Iran's supreme leader has called for stepped-up armed struggle against Israel, rejecting dialogue to resolve the conflict in the Middle East. Khamenei spoke Tuesday in Tehran at the opening of a two-day conference aimed at boosting support for the Palestinian uprising.

Khamenei claimed that Zionists exaggerated the size of the Holocaust to win sympathy for a Jewish state. He said that Zionists worked closely with the Nazis during World War II to fabricate statistics on the number of Jews who were killed.

Historians agree that the Nazis killed around six million European Jews between 1940 and 1945. The catastrophe led to mass Jewish immigration after the war to what was then British-ruled Palestine.

The Tehran conference has brought together delegates from more than 30 Arab and Islamic countries along with hard-core anti-Israel groups including Hizbullah, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Hizbullah head Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said Islamic countries should give practical assistance to the Palestinians, saying it was the Arab world's fate to battle the Jewish state. He said Israel should expect more attacks from Palestinian militant groups.

The United States blasted comments made by Iran's supreme leader concerning the Holocaust at a pro-Palestinian international conference. The U.S. State Department denounced as "outrageous" and "deplorable" a statement by Ayatollah Ali Khameini that Zionists exaggerated the size of the Holocaust to win sympathy for a Jewish state.