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At first, Israel's air strike on the Hamas negotiating team in Qatar seemed like another intensification that pushed the hope of peace further away.

The attack on September 9 violated the sovereignty of an American ally and threatened widening the conflict into a region-wide war.

Negotiations appeared to be collapsing.

However, it turned out to be a key moment that has led in a deal, announced by President Donald Trump, to release all remaining hostages.

That represents a goal that Trump, and President Joe Biden before him, had sought for nearly two years.

This marks just the first step towards a more durable peace, and the details of disarming Hamas, Gaza governance and complete Israeli pullout remain to be worked out.

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

Trump's unique style and key alliances with Israel and the Middle Eastern nations seem to have played a role in this breakthrough.

But, as with many diplomatic achievements, there were also elements at play beyond the control of both leaders.

A Close Relationship Which Biden Never Had

In public, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are consistently friendly.

Trump likes to say that the nation has no better friend, and the Israeli leader has called Trump as Israel's "greatest ever ally in the US presidency". And these positive statements have been backed up by deeds.

During his first presidential term, the president relocated the American diplomatic mission in the country from its former location to the contested capital and discarded a traditional American stance that Jewish communities in the Palestinian West Bank are illegal, the position under international law.

After the Israeli military began its air strikes against the Islamic Republic in June, Trump directed American aircraft to strike the Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities with its most powerful conventional bombs.

Those visible shows of support may have allowed Trump the room to apply more pressure on Israel in private. According to reports, Trump's envoy, Steve Witkoff, browbeat Netanyahu in late 2024 into agreeing to a halt in fighting in exchange for the freeing of a number of captives.

After Israeli forces attacked against Syrian forces in the summer, even hitting a Christian church, Trump urged Netanyahu to change course.

Trump displayed a level of will and insistence on an Israel's leader that is virtually unprecedented, according to an analyst of the a think tank. "There is no example of an US leader literally telling an Israeli leader that you're going to have to comply or else."

Biden's connection with Netanyahu's government was consistently more tenuous.

The Biden team's "bear hug strategy" held that the US had to support Israel publicly in order to enable it to influence the country's war conduct in private.

Beneath this was Biden's nearly half-century of backing for Israel, as well as deep disagreements within his Democratic coalition over the Gaza War. Each move Biden took endangered fracturing his own domestic support, while Trump's solid Republican base gave him more flexibility to act.

Ultimately, domestic politics or individual ties may have had less importance than the simple fact that, throughout his term, the Israeli government was not ready to make peace.

Eight months into Trump's second term, with Iran weakened, the militant group to its immediate north significantly reduced and Gaza in ruins, all its major strategy objectives had been achieved.

Commercial Background Helped Gain Support from Arab States

The Israeli missile attack in the Qatari capital, which killed a Qatari citizen but no Hamas officials, led the president to issue an final demand to the prime minister. Hostilities had to end.

The US leader had given the Israeli military a relatively free hand in the territory. The president provided American military might to Israel's campaign in the neighboring country. However an strike on Qatar soil was a separate issue entirely, pushing him closer to the Arab position on how best to end the war.

A number of Trump officials have informed the press that this was a turning point which motivated the leader to exert full force to finalize an agreement.

This US president's strong connections with the Gulf states are widely known. He has commercial interests with Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. He began both his presidential terms with official trips to Saudi Arabia. Recently, Trump also stopped in Qatar and the UAE capital.

The president's normalization agreements, which established ties between the Jewish state and a number of Arab nations, including the Emirates, was the most significant diplomatic achievement of his initial presidency.

The time he spent in the cities of the Gulf region in recent months contributed to change his thinking, according to Ed Husain of the Council on Foreign Relations. Trump did not travel to Israel on this Middle East trip but went to the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar where the leader heard repeated calls to bring an end to the war.

Within weeks after that attack on the city, the president sat nearby as Netanyahu personally called the Qatari leadership to express regret. Subsequently, the prime minister signed off on Trump's 20-point peace plan for the territory - one that also had the support of influential Arab states in the region.

Assuming the president's relationship with Netanyahu gave him the ability to influence Israel to strike a deal, his history with Arab rulers may have secured their support, and assisted them convince the group to commit to the arrangement.

"One of the things that clearly happened was that the US leader gained leverage with the Israeli government, and through intermediaries with the militants," says an analyst of the a research center.

"This was crucial. The capacity to achieve this on his timing, and not succumb to the desires of the combatants has been a challenge that lot of previous presidents have faced, and Trump appears to handle relatively successfully."

The reality that the president is much more popular in Israel than the prime minister personally was leverage that Trump employed to his advantage, the expert continues.

Currently Israel has agreed to freeing more than 1,000 detainees held in Israeli prisons and has agreed to a partial withdrawal from the strip.

Hamas will release all the captives still held, both alive and deceased, captured during the original 7 October Hamas attack, which resulted in the loss of more than 1,200 Israelis.

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