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Initially, Israel's air strike on the Hamas militant delegation in Qatar seemed like yet another escalation that pushed the prospect of peace further away.

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

Diplomacy seemed to be in ruins.

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

This is a objective that he, and 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 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 escaped Biden and his administration.

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

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

A Close Relationship That Eluded Biden

Publicly, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are all smiles.

The president often states that the nation has no greater ally, and the Israeli leader has called Trump as Israel's "greatest ever ally in the US presidency". Moreover these warm words have been matched by deeds.

During his first presidential term, the president relocated the US embassy 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 international law.

When the Israeli military began its bombing campaign against the Islamic Republic in June, the US leader ordered American aircraft to target the nation's nuclear enrichment facilities with its most powerful conventional bombs.

Those public demonstrations of support may have allowed Trump the room to apply more pressure on Israel behind the scenes. According to reports, the president's envoy, Steve Witkoff, pressured Netanyahu in the latter part of the year into accepting a temporary ceasefire in return for the freeing of a number of captives.

After Israel attacked against Syrian forces in July, even hitting a Christian church, the US president pressured Netanyahu to change course.

The leader exhibited a degree of will and pressure on an Israeli prime minister that is rarely seen, says Aaron David Miller of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "It's unheard of of an US leader literally telling an Israeli leader that you're going to have to comply or else."

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

His administration's "close embrace strategy" held that the United States had to embrace the nation publicly in order to allow it to influence the nation's military actions in private.

Beneath this was the president's decades-long of backing for the state, as well as deep disagreements within his political base over the conflict in Gaza. Each move Biden took risked dividing his own domestic support, whereas Trump's solid Republican base provided him more flexibility to manoeuvre.

Ultimately, internal considerations or personal relationships may have had less importance than the simple fact that, throughout Biden's presidency, the Israeli government was unwilling to reach an agreement.

Several months into Trump's second term, with the Islamic Republic chastened, the militant group to its northern border significantly reduced and the coastal strip devastated, every one of its key military goals had been accomplished.

Commercial Background Assisted Gain Gulf's Backing

The Israeli missile attack in Doha, which killed a Qatari citizen but no Hamas officials, prompted the president to deliver an ultimatum to Netanyahu. Hostilities had to stop.

Trump had allowed the Israeli military a relatively free hand in Gaza. The president lent US armed support to Israel's campaign in Iran. However an strike on Qatar soil was a separate issue completely, moving him towards the Arab position on how best to conclude the conflict.

Several Trump officials have informed the press that this was a turning point which galvanised the leader to apply full force to get a peace deal done.

This US president's strong connections with the Arab monarchies are well documented. Trump has commercial interests with Qatar and the UAE. He began each of his administrations with state visits to Saudi Arabia. Recently, he also visited in Qatar and Abu Dhabi.

The president's normalization agreements, which normalised relations between the Jewish state and several Muslim states, 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 visit the country on this Middle East trip but visited the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the state where the leader heard repeated calls to put a stop to the conflict.

Within weeks after that attack on the city, the president sat close as Netanyahu personally called the Qatari leadership to apologise. Subsequently, the prime minister signed off on the president's comprehensive proposal for the territory - one that additionally had the support of influential Arab states in the region.

If the president's alliance with his counterpart gave him the room to pressure Israel to strike a deal, his past with Arab rulers may have secured their support, and assisted them convince the group to agree to the arrangement.

"One of the things that clearly happened was that President Trump gained influence with the Israeli government, and indirectly with the militants," says an analyst of the a research center.

"That made a difference. The capacity to do this on his own schedule, and not succumb to the desires of the combatants has been a problem that lot of earlier administrations have faced, and he appears to handle with some success."

The fact that the president is far better liked in Israel than the prime minister himself was an advantage that he used to his advantage, the expert continues.

Now Israel has committed to releasing over a thousand detainees imprisoned in Israeli prisons and has agreed to a limited pullback from the strip.

The group will free all the remaining hostages, both alive and deceased, taken during the original 7 October assault, which resulted in the death of over 1,200 Israeli citizens.

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