May 24 (Reuters) - ICE cotton futures rose on Wednesday on a weaker dollar and short covering ahead of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's weekly export sales report on Thursday.

"People are starting to look at the U.S. export sales again. ... There is a pretty large unfixed sales position and with prices moving up, a lot of them are covering their short positions," said Gabriel Crivorot, analyst at Societe Generale in New York. "People still have a bullish view that U.S. exports will continue to be strong through this year."

The dollar index was down 0.25 percent. The Thomson Reuters CoreCommodity CRB Index , which tracks 19 commodities, was down 0.61 percent.

The December cotton contract on ICE futures U.S. settled up 0.71 cent, or 0.98 percent, at 73.08 cents per lb. It traded within a range of 72.25 and 73.13 cents a lb.

The July cotton contract settled up 0.4 percent at 77.54 cents per lb. "Merchant and traders report little fresh demand, although there are still many mills have yet to fix their July 17 on-call contracts," INTL FCStone analyst Andy Ryan wrote in a note.

"With the market back to prices seen pre-spike, mills should be eager to buy on any further drop. The weaker U.S. dollar and declining cotton price might help spur more robust demand in the months ahead."

Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of May 23 totaled 411,726 480-lb bales, up from 409,046 in the previous session.

Total futures market volume fell by 283 to 29,598 lots. Data showed total open interest fell 5,255 to 246,477 contracts in the previous session.

(Reporting By Nallur Sethuraman in Bengaluru; Editing by Richard Chang)