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

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

Diplomacy appeared to be collapsing.

Instead, it turned out to be a pivotal event that culminated in a agreement, declared by Donald Trump, to free all captives still held.

That represents a goal that he, and President Joe Biden previously, had sought for almost 24 months.

This marks just the initial phase towards a lasting resolution, and the specifics of disarming Hamas, Gaza governance and full Israeli withdrawal remain to be worked out.

Yet if this agreement holds, it could be Trump's defining accomplishment of his second term - one that eluded Joe Biden and his administration.

The president's distinct approach and crucial relationships with the Israeli government and the Arab world seem to have played a role in this success.

However, as with most diplomatic achievements, there were also elements at play beyond the influence of both leaders.

Strong Ties Which Eluded Biden

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

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

During his first presidential term, Trump moved the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and abandoned a long-held US position that Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are against international law, the view under international law.

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

These visible shows of support may have given Trump the room to apply more pressure on the Israeli government in private. According to reports, Trump's envoy, Steve Witkoff, browbeat the prime minister in late 2024 into accepting a halt in fighting in return for the release of some hostages.

When Israeli forces launched strikes against Syrian forces in July, even hitting a Christian church, Trump pressured his counterpart to alter tactics.

Trump exhibited a level of will and insistence on an Israel's leader that is virtually unprecedented, according to Aaron David Miller of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "It's unheard of of an US leader directly instructing an Israeli leader that they must agree or else."

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

His administration's "bear hug strategy" argued that the US had to support Israel publicly in order to allow it to moderate the country's war conduct in private.

Beneath this was Biden's decades-long of support for the state, as well as sharp divisions within his political base over the Gaza War. Each move Biden took risked fracturing his own domestic support, whereas his successor's solid Republican base provided him more room to act.

In the end, domestic politics or individual ties may have had less importance than the simple fact that, during his term, the Israeli government was not ready to reach an agreement.

Several months into his new administration, with the Islamic Republic weakened, the militant group to its northern border significantly reduced and the coastal strip in ruins, every one of its major strategy objectives had been achieved.

Business History Helped Gain Support from Arab States

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 given Israel a relatively free hand in Gaza. He lent US armed support to Israeli operations in Iran. However an strike on Qatar soil was a separate issue completely, pushing him towards the Arab position on how best to conclude the conflict.

A number of administration figures have told the press that this was a decisive moment which galvanised the leader to apply maximum pressure to finalize an agreement.

This US president's close ties with the Arab monarchies are widely known. Trump has business dealings with the emirate and the UAE. The president began both his presidential terms with state visits to the kingdom. This year, Trump also stopped in Qatar and the UAE capital.

The president's normalization agreements, which established ties between Israel and a number of Arab nations, such as the UAE, was the most significant foreign policy success of his initial presidency.

The time he spent in the cities of the Arabian Peninsula earlier this year helped change his thinking, according to an expert of the Council on Foreign Relations. The US president did not visit the country on this Middle East trip but went to the UAE, the kingdom and the state where the leader heard repeated calls to bring an end to the war.

Within weeks after that attack on the city, the president was present nearby as Netanyahu personally called the Qatari leadership to express regret. And later that day, the prime minister signed off on the president's comprehensive proposal for the territory - one that additionally had the backing of influential Arab states in the region.

Assuming the president's relationship with his counterpart gave him the room to pressure the government to strike a deal, his past with Arab rulers may have secured their support, and assisted them convince Hamas to agree 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 Jon Alterman of the a research center.

"This was crucial. His ability to do this on his own schedule, and avoid yielding to the desires of the warring sides has been a challenge that lot of previous presidents have struggled with, and he appears to do with some success."

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

Now the Israeli government has agreed to freeing more than 1,000 detainees held in Israeli prisons and has consented to a partial withdrawal from Gaza.

Hamas will free all the captives still held, both alive and deceased, taken during the initial October 7 Hamas attack, which caused the death of over 1,200 Israelis.

An end to the war, which has resulted in the devastation of the territory and the deaths of over 67,000 {Palestinians|Pal