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

This strike on September 9 breached the sovereignty of an US partner and risked expanding the hostilities into a broader regional conflict.

Diplomacy seemed to be collapsing.

However, it turned out to be a key moment that culminated in a deal, announced by President Donald Trump, to free all captives still held.

This is a objective that Trump, and Joe Biden previously, had sought for almost 24 months.

This marks just the first step towards a more durable peace, and the specifics of disarming Hamas, Gaza governance and full Israeli withdrawal remain to be negotiated.

But if this deal holds, it could be Trump's defining accomplishment of his return to office - one that escaped Joe Biden and his administration.

Trump's unique style and key alliances with Israel and the Arab world appear to have contributed in this success.

However, as with many foreign policy wins, there were also elements at play beyond the influence of either man.

Strong Ties That Biden Never Had

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

Trump likes to say that the nation has no greater ally, and the Israeli leader has called him as the country's "greatest ever ally in the White House". And these warm words have been matched by actions.

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 occupied territories are illegal, the view under global norms.

After Israel began its bombing campaign against Iran in June, Trump directed US bombers to target the nation's atomic sites with its most powerful conventional bombs.

These visible shows of backing may have given Trump the leeway to exert more influence on the Israeli government in private. According to reports, Trump's negotiator, Steve Witkoff, browbeat the prime minister in late 2024 into accepting a temporary ceasefire in exchange for the release of some hostages.

After Israeli forces launched strikes against Syria's military in July, even hitting a Christian church, the US president urged his counterpart to alter tactics.

Trump exhibited a level of will and insistence on an Israel's leader that is rarely seen, according to an analyst of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "It's unheard of of an US leader directly instructing an Israeli leader that you're going to have to comply or else."

Biden's connection with the Israeli administration was consistently more tenuous.

His administration's "bear hug strategy" held that the US had to embrace the nation openly in order to allow it to moderate the nation's war conduct in private.

Beneath this was Biden's decades-long of backing for Israel, as well as sharp divisions within his Democratic coalition over the conflict in Gaza. Every step the leader took risked fracturing his own domestic support, whereas Trump's solid Republican base gave him more room to manoeuvre.

In the end, domestic politics or personal relationships may have had less importance than the simple fact that, throughout his term, the Israeli government was unwilling to make peace.

Several months into his new administration, with Iran chastened, the militant group to its northern border greatly diminished and Gaza devastated, every one of its major strategy objectives had been accomplished.

Business History Helped Gain Support from Arab States

An Israeli strike in Doha, which killed a local national but no Hamas officials, led Trump to deliver an ultimatum to the prime minister. Hostilities had to stop.

The US leader had allowed Israel a significant latitude in Gaza. He lent American military might to Israeli operations in Iran. But an strike on Qatari territory was a separate issue entirely, moving him towards the stance of Arab nations on how best to conclude the conflict.

Several Trump officials have told media outlets that this was a decisive moment which motivated the leader to exert maximum pressure to get a peace deal done.

This US president's close ties with the Arab monarchies are well documented. He has commercial interests with Qatar and the UAE. The president began each of his administrations with official trips to the kingdom. Recently, he also stopped in Qatar and the UAE capital.

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

His visits devoted in the capitals of the Arabian Peninsula in recent months helped shift his perspective, says an expert of the Council on Foreign Relations. Trump did not travel to Israel on this regional tour but went to the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the state where he received consistent appeals to bring an end to the conflict.

Less than a month after that attack on Doha, Trump sat nearby as the prime minister himself called Qatar to express regret. Subsequently, the prime minister gave approval on the president's comprehensive proposal for Gaza - one that also had the support of influential Arab states in the region.

If Trump's alliance with Netanyahu provided him the room to influence the government to reach an agreement, his past with Arab rulers may have ensured their support, and helped them convince the group to commit to the arrangement.

"One of the things that evidently occurred was that the US leader developed leverage with the Israeli government, and indirectly with the militants," notes Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"This was crucial. The capacity to achieve this on his own schedule, and avoid yielding to the desires of the warring sides has been a problem that lot of earlier administrations have struggled with, and he appears to do with some success."

The fact that Trump is much more popular in the nation than Netanyahu personally was leverage that he used to his benefit, he adds.

Now Israel has committed to freeing over a thousand detainees held in its jails and has consented to a limited pullback from Gaza.

The group will free all the captives still held, both alive and deceased, captured during the initial October 7 Hamas attack, which caused the death of over 1,200 Israeli citizens.

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