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At first, the Israeli aerial attack on the Hamas negotiating team in Qatar appeared like yet another intensification that drove the prospect of peace out of reach.

This strike on September 9 breached the territorial integrity of an US partner and threatened widening the hostilities into a broader regional conflict.

Diplomacy appeared to be collapsing.

However, it turned out to be a key moment that has led in a deal, declared by President Donald Trump, to release all captives still held.

This is a goal that Trump, and Joe Biden previously, had pursued for nearly two years.

It is just the first step towards a more durable peace, and the specifics of disarming Hamas, administering Gaza and complete Israeli pullout are still to be worked out.

But if this deal stands, it could be Donald Trump's defining accomplishment of his return to office - one that escaped Biden and his diplomatic team.

Trump's unique style and key alliances with the Israeli government and the Middle Eastern nations seem to have contributed in this success.

But, as with many diplomatic achievements, there were also elements involved beyond the influence of both leaders.

A Close Relationship Which Eluded Biden

Publicly, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are all smiles.

The president often states that the nation has no greater ally, and Netanyahu has described Trump as the country's "greatest ever ally in the White House". Moreover these positive statements have been backed up by actions.

Throughout his initial time in office, Trump relocated the American diplomatic mission in Israel from its former location to Jerusalem and discarded a traditional American stance that Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are illegal, the view under international law.

When Israel began its bombing campaign against Iran in June, Trump ordered US bombers to strike the nation's atomic sites with its largest non-nuclear weapons.

Those public demonstrations of support may have given Trump the room to apply more pressure on the Israeli government in private. According to reports, Trump's negotiator, Steve Witkoff, pressured the prime minister in late 2024 into agreeing to a temporary ceasefire in return for the freeing of a number of captives.

When Israeli forces attacked against Syrian forces in July, including hitting a Christian church, the US president urged his counterpart to alter tactics.

Trump exhibited a level of determination and pressure on an Israeli prime minister that is rarely seen, according to an analyst of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "There is no example of an American president directly instructing an Israeli prime minister that they must agree or else."

Joe Biden's relationship with Netanyahu's government was always more tenuous.

The Biden team's "close embrace strategy" argued that the United States had to support Israel publicly in order to enable it to influence the country's military actions in private.

Beneath this was Biden's nearly half-century of backing for Israel, as well as sharp divisions within his political base over the conflict in Gaza. Each move Biden took endangered dividing his own political backing, whereas Trump's loyal conservative voters gave him more room to manoeuvre.

In the end, internal considerations or individual ties may have had less importance than the reality that, throughout Biden's presidency, Israel was unwilling to make peace.

Eight months into his new administration, with the Islamic Republic weakened, Hezbollah to its northern border greatly diminished and the coastal strip in ruins, all its key military goals had been accomplished.

Business History Assisted Gain Gulf's Backing

The Israeli missile attack in Doha, which killed a local national but no Hamas officials, led Trump to deliver an final demand to the prime minister. The war had to stop.

Trump had allowed the Israeli military a significant latitude in Gaza. The president lent US armed support to Israeli operations in the neighboring country. However an attack on Qatar soil was a different matter completely, pushing him closer to the Arab position on how best to conclude the conflict.

A number of Trump officials have told media outlets that this was a turning point which galvanised the leader to exert full force to get a peace deal done.

The leader's close ties with the Gulf states are well documented. He has commercial interests with Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. He began each of his administrations with official trips to the kingdom. Recently, he also visited in Doha and Abu Dhabi.

His Abraham Accords, which normalised relations between the Jewish state and a number of Arab nations, including the UAE, was the most significant foreign policy success of his first term.

The time he spent in the capitals of the Gulf region earlier this year helped shift his perspective, says an expert of the Council on Foreign Relations. Trump did not travel to Israel on this Middle East trip but visited the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and the state where he heard consistent appeals to bring an end to the war.

Less than a month after that Israeli strike on Doha, the president sat nearby as Netanyahu personally called the Qatari leadership to apologise. And later that day, the prime minister signed off on Trump's 20-point peace plan for Gaza - one that additionally had the backing of key Muslim nations in the area.

Assuming Trump's relationship with his counterpart provided him the room to pressure the government to strike a deal, his past with Muslim leaders may have secured their support, and helped them convince the group to commit to the deal.

"One of the things that evidently occurred was that President Trump developed influence with the Israelis, and through intermediaries with the militants," notes an analyst of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"This was crucial. The capacity to achieve this on his timing, and not succumb to the desires of the warring sides has been a problem that lot of earlier administrations have struggled with, and Trump appears to handle with some success."

The fact that Trump is far better liked in Israel than the prime minister personally was leverage that he employed to his benefit, he adds.

Now Israel has agreed to releasing over a thousand detainees imprisoned in its jails and has consented to a limited pullback from the strip.

The group will release all the captives still held, both alive and deceased, captured in the original 7 October assault, which caused the loss of more than 1,200 Israelis.

An end to the conflict, which has resulted in the destruction of Gaza and the deaths of over 67,000 {Palestinians|Pal