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At first, the Israeli air strike on the Hamas militant negotiating team in Qatar seemed like another escalation that drove the prospect of peace further away.

The attack on 9 September breached the sovereignty of an US partner and threatened expanding the hostilities into a region-wide war.

Negotiations seemed to be in ruins.

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

That represents a goal that he, and President Joe Biden before him, had pursued for almost 24 months.

This marks just the first step towards a more durable peace, and the details of Hamas disarmament, administering Gaza and complete Israeli pullout are still to be worked out.

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

Trump's distinct approach and key alliances with Israel and the Middle Eastern nations seem to have played a role in this success.

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

Strong Ties That Eluded Biden

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

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

Throughout his first presidential term, Trump moved the American diplomatic mission in Israel from its former location to Jerusalem and discarded a traditional American stance that Jewish communities in the Palestinian West Bank are against international law, the position under global norms.

When Israel began its air strikes against Iran in June, Trump ordered American aircraft to strike the nation's atomic sites with its most powerful conventional bombs.

Those public demonstrations of support may have allowed Trump the room to exert more pressure on Israel in private. According to reports, Trump's envoy, his representative, browbeat Netanyahu in the latter part of the year into agreeing to a halt in fighting in return for the freeing of some hostages.

After Israel launched strikes against Syria's military in July, including bombing a place of worship, the US president pressured Netanyahu to alter tactics.

Trump exhibited a level of determination and insistence on an Israel's leader that is rarely seen, says Aaron David Miller of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "There is no example of an US leader directly instructing an Israeli prime minister that they must agree or else."

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

The Biden team's "close embrace strategy" argued that the United States had to support the nation openly in order to allow it to moderate the nation's military actions in private.

Beneath this was Biden's decades-long of backing for Israel, as well as deep disagreements within his political base over the Gaza War. Each move Biden took endangered dividing his own domestic support, while Trump's solid Republican base gave him more room to manoeuvre.

In the end, internal considerations or personal relationships may have had less importance than the simple fact that, throughout Biden's presidency, Israel was unwilling to make peace.

Several months into Trump's second term, with the Islamic Republic chastened, the militant group to its northern border greatly diminished and Gaza devastated, all its major strategy objectives had been achieved.

Commercial Background Assisted Secure Support from Arab States

An Israeli strike in Doha, which killed a local national but no Hamas officials, prompted the president to issue an ultimatum to the prime minister. The war had to stop.

Trump had given Israel a relatively free hand in the territory. The president provided American military might to Israel's campaign in Iran. However an attack on Qatari territory was a different matter entirely, moving him closer to the stance of Arab nations on how best to end the war.

A number of Trump officials have informed media outlets that this was a decisive moment which motivated the president to exert maximum pressure to get a peace deal done.

This US president's close ties with the Gulf states are widely known. He has commercial interests with Qatar and the UAE. The president began both his presidential terms with official trips to the kingdom. This year, Trump also stopped in Qatar and the UAE capital.

His normalization agreements, which established ties between the Jewish state and a number of Arab nations, such as the Emirates, was the most significant foreign policy success of his initial presidency.

The time devoted in the capitals of the Gulf region earlier this year contributed to shift his perspective, according to an expert of the Council on Foreign Relations. The US president did not visit the country on this regional tour but went to the United Arab Emirates, the kingdom and the state where the leader received consistent appeals to bring an end to the conflict.

Within weeks after that Israeli strike on Doha, Trump was present close as the prime minister personally phoned Qatar to express regret. And later that day, the prime minister gave approval on Trump's comprehensive proposal for Gaza - one that additionally had the support of influential Arab states in the region.

Assuming the president's relationship with his counterpart gave him the room to influence the government to reach an agreement, his past with Arab rulers may have ensured their backing, and helped them convince the group to commit to the arrangement.

"A key factor that evidently occurred was that the US leader developed influence with the Israelis, and through intermediaries with Hamas," says Jon Alterman of the a research center.

"That made a difference. The capacity to achieve this on his timing, and not succumb to the demands of the combatants has been a problem that lot of earlier administrations have struggled with, and Trump seems to do relatively successfully."

The fact that the president is much more popular in Israel than the prime minister personally was an advantage that he employed to his advantage, the expert continues.

Now the Israeli government has agreed to freeing more than 1,000 Palestinians imprisoned in its jails and has consented to a limited pullback from Gaza.

Hamas will release all the captives still held, both alive and deceased, captured during the initial October 7 assault, which resulted in the death of over 1,200 Israelis.

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