Crawford, Texas ? Iran rebuffed on Friday the Bush administration’s offer of a humanitarian delegation headed by a high-profile Republican senator to deliver earthquake relief.

Iran said it preferred that the U.S. proposal to dispatch Sen. Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, former president of the American Red Cross, to Iran be “held in abeyance” because of the current situation on the ground in Iran. A Dec. 26 earthquake killed more than 30,000 people.

The United States and Iran broke diplomatic relations shortly after the seizure of U.S. embassy officials in 1979 in Tehran. There has been no publicly announced visit by a U.S. government representative to Iran since then.