Obama seeks 6 months time to give diplomacy a chance with Iran

"We are not doing anything around the most powerful sanctions. The oil sanctions, the banking sanctions, the financial services sanctions, those are the ones that have really taken a big chunk out of the Iranian economy," he said.

Obama said Iranians "would roll back some elements that get them closer to what we call breakout capacity, where they can run for a weapon."

"In return, what we would do would be to open up the spigot a little bit for a very modest amount of relief that is entirely subject to reinstatement if, in fact, they violated any part of this early agreement. It would purchase a period of time - let's say six months, during which we could see if they could get to the end state of a position where we, the Israelis, the international community could say with confidence, Iran's not pursuing a nuclear weapon," he added.