The "unprecedented severity" of a UN nuclear watchdog report on Iran's alleged atomic weapons drive makes an imminent Israeli military strike unlikely, Israeli television stations said on Tuesday.
Channels 2 and 10 said the report would allow Israel "some weeks or some months" to see if the international community slaps "crippling sanctions" on the Islamic republic.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Tuesday gave its clearest indication yet that Iran may be developing nuclear weapons, publishing a massive body of intelligence already dismissed by Tehran as fabricated.
In a keenly awaited report seen by AFP, the agency said it had "serious concerns regarding possible military dimensions to Iran's nuclear programme."
It said it had its "credible" information from foreign intelligence reports and its own research that indicates that Iran "has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device."
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office, meanwhile, declined to make any comment, saying only that it was studying the report.
Israel "has not yet decided on a military operation against Iran... We do not want war," Defence Minister Ehud Barak said hours before the publication of the IAEA report.
Earlier on Tuesday, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said only crippling sanctions against Iran's central bank and its oil and gas industries wouldforce Tehran to halt its nuclear drive.
"If, after the IAEA report comes out, the United States does not lead an initiative of crippling sanctions against Iran, this will mean that the United States and the West have accepted a nuclear Iran," he said in Maariv newspaper.
Only such a course of action would yield real results and show Tehran's Islamic rulers that continuing the nuclear race would endanger Irans future as well as their chances of continuing to govern, Lieberman said.
Israeli President Shimon Peres said on Sunday that a strike against Iran was becoming more likely, in one of the starkest warnings by the Jewish state to Tehran in recent times.
"The possibility of a military attack against Iran is now closer to being applied than the application of a diplomatic option," Peres said.