🔗 Share this article

At first, Israel's air strike on the Hamas militant delegation in Qatar appeared like another intensification that drove the hope of peace further away.

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

Diplomacy appeared to be collapsing.

Instead, it turned out to be a pivotal event that culminated in a deal, declared by President Donald Trump, to free all remaining hostages.

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

This marks just the first step towards a lasting resolution, and the details of disarming Hamas, Gaza governance and full Israeli withdrawal are still to be worked out.

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

Trump's unique style and crucial relationships with the Israeli government and the Middle Eastern nations appear to have played a role in this success.

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

Strong Ties That Biden Never Had

Publicly, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are consistently friendly.

Trump often states that Israel has no greater ally, and Netanyahu has called Trump as the country's "most supportive friend in the White House". Moreover these warm words have been backed up by actions.

During his initial time in office, the president relocated the American diplomatic mission in the country from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and discarded a long-held US position that Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are against international law, the position under global norms.

After the Israeli military began its air strikes against the Islamic Republic in the summer, the US leader ordered American aircraft to target the Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities with its largest non-nuclear weapons.

These public demonstrations of support may have given the president the room to apply more influence on the Israeli government in private. As per sources, the president's negotiator, Steve Witkoff, pressured the prime minister in the latter part of the year into agreeing to a temporary ceasefire in exchange for the release of a number of captives.

After Israeli forces launched strikes against Syrian forces in the summer, even hitting a Christian church, the US president urged Netanyahu to change course.

The leader exhibited a level of will and insistence on an Israel's leader that is rarely seen, says 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 the Israeli administration was consistently more strained.

The Biden team's "bear hug strategy" argued that the United States had to embrace Israel publicly in order to enable it to influence the nation's military actions behind closed doors.

Underneath this was Biden's decades-long of backing for the state, as well as deep disagreements within his political base over the conflict in Gaza. Each move the leader took endangered fracturing his own political backing, whereas Trump's solid Republican base provided him more room to manoeuvre.

Ultimately, domestic politics or personal relationships may have had less importance than the reality that, during his term, the Israeli government was not ready to reach an agreement.

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

Business History Assisted Gain Gulf's Backing

The Israeli missile attack in the Qatari capital, which killed a Qatari citizen but no Hamas officials, prompted Trump to issue an ultimatum to Netanyahu. The war had to stop.

The US leader had given the Israeli military a significant latitude in the territory. He lent US armed support to Israeli operations in the neighboring country. However an attack on Qatari territory was a different matter entirely, moving him closer to the stance of Arab nations on how best to conclude the conflict.

Several administration figures have informed media outlets that this was a turning point which galvanised the president to exert full force to finalize an agreement.

The leader's close ties with the Arab monarchies are well documented. Trump has commercial interests with the emirate and the UAE. He began both his presidential terms with state visits to the kingdom. Recently, he also visited in Qatar and the UAE capital.

His normalization agreements, which established ties between the Jewish state and several Muslim states, including the Emirates, was the most significant foreign policy success of his initial presidency.

His visits devoted in the capitals of the Arabian Peninsula earlier this year helped change his thinking, according to Ed Husain of the a policy institute. The US president did not travel to the country on this Middle East trip but visited the United Arab Emirates, the kingdom and Qatar where he received repeated calls to put a stop to the war.

Within weeks after that attack on the city, Trump sat nearby as Netanyahu personally phoned the Qatari leadership to apologise. And later that day, the prime minister gave approval on the president's comprehensive proposal for the territory - one that also had the backing of influential Arab states in the area.

Assuming Trump's relationship with his counterpart gave him the ability to pressure Israel to reach an agreement, his past with Muslim leaders may have ensured their backing, and assisted them persuade Hamas to commit to the deal.

"One of the things that clearly happened was that President Trump gained influence with the Israeli government, and indirectly with Hamas," says Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"That made a difference. The capacity to do this on his own schedule, and avoid yielding to the desires of the warring sides has been a challenge that lot of earlier administrations have faced, and he seems to do relatively successfully."

The reality that Trump is much more popular in Israel than the prime minister personally was an advantage that he used to his advantage, the expert continues.

Currently the Israeli government has committed to releasing more than 1,000 detainees imprisoned in Israeli prisons and has agreed to a partial withdrawal from Gaza.

The group will release all the captives still held, both alive and deceased, taken in the initial October 7 assault, which caused the loss of more than 1,200 Israeli citizens.

An end to the war, which has led to the devastation of the territory and the fatalities of over 67,000 {Palestinians|Pal