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At first, Israel's aerial attack on the Hamas militant delegation in Qatar seemed like yet another intensification that pushed the hope of a ceasefire out of reach.

This strike on September 9 breached the sovereignty of an American ally and threatened expanding the conflict into a region-wide war.

Diplomacy appeared to be collapsing.

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

This is a goal that he, and Joe Biden before him, had pursued for nearly two years.

It is just the first step towards a more durable peace, and the details of Hamas disarmament, administering Gaza and complete Israeli pullout remain to be negotiated.

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

The president's unique style and key alliances with Israel and the Arab world seem to have played a role in this breakthrough.

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

Strong Ties That Biden Never Had

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

The president likes to say that Israel has no better friend, and the Israeli leader has described Trump as Israel's "most supportive friend in the US presidency". Moreover these warm words have been backed up by actions.

During his initial time in office, the president relocated the American diplomatic mission in Israel from its former location to the contested capital and discarded a traditional American stance that Jewish communities in the occupied territories are illegal, the position under international law.

After the Israeli military began its air strikes against Iran in the summer, Trump directed American aircraft to target the nation's atomic sites with its largest non-nuclear weapons.

Those public demonstrations of backing may have allowed the president the leeway to exert more influence on Israel behind the scenes. According to reports, the president's envoy, Steve Witkoff, browbeat Netanyahu in the latter part of the year into agreeing to a halt in fighting in exchange for the freeing of some hostages.

After Israel attacked against Syria's military in the summer, even bombing a Christian church, the US president pressured his counterpart to alter tactics.

Trump exhibited a degree of will and pressure on an Israel's leader that is virtually unprecedented, according to an analyst of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "There is no example of an American president directly instructing an Israeli prime minister that you're going to have to comply or else."

Joe Biden's relationship with the Israeli administration was always more tenuous.

The Biden team's "bear hug strategy" argued that the United States had to embrace Israel openly in order to allow it to moderate the country's war conduct behind closed doors.

Underneath this was the president's nearly half-century of backing for the state, as well as sharp divisions within his Democratic coalition over the Gaza War. Each move Biden took risked dividing his own political backing, while his successor's solid Republican base provided him more room to manoeuvre.

In the end, domestic politics or individual ties may have had less importance than the reality that, during his term, the Israeli government was unwilling to make peace.

Several months into Trump's second term, with Iran chastened, Hezbollah to its northern border significantly reduced and the coastal strip devastated, all its key military goals had been achieved.

Business History Helped Secure Support from Arab States

The Israeli missile attack in Doha, which killed a local national but no Hamas officials, led the president to issue an final demand to Netanyahu. Hostilities had to stop.

The US leader had given Israel a relatively free hand in Gaza. The president provided American military might to Israel's campaign in Iran. However an attack on Qatar soil was a different matter entirely, moving him towards the Arab position on how best to end the war.

Several administration figures have told the press that this was a turning point which motivated the leader to exert full force to get a peace deal done.

The leader's close ties with the Gulf states are widely known. He has business dealings with the emirate and the UAE. The president began both his presidential terms with state visits to the kingdom. Recently, he also visited in Qatar and Abu Dhabi.

The president's normalization agreements, which established ties between the Jewish state and several Muslim states, including the Emirates, was the biggest foreign policy success of his first term.

His visits devoted in the capitals of the Gulf region earlier this year helped change his thinking, says an expert of the a policy institute. Trump did not travel to Israel on this regional tour but went to the United Arab Emirates, the kingdom and Qatar where he received repeated calls to bring an end to the war.

Less than a month after that Israeli strike on the city, Trump sat close as the prime minister himself called Qatar to apologise. Subsequently, the prime minister signed off on the president's 20-point peace plan for Gaza - one that additionally had the backing of influential Arab states in the area.

If Trump's alliance with Netanyahu provided him the room to influence the government to strike a deal, his past with Arab rulers may have ensured their backing, and helped them convince Hamas to agree to the arrangement.

"One of the things that evidently occurred was that President Trump developed leverage with the Israelis, and indirectly with the militants," notes Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"This was crucial. The capacity to do this on his own schedule, and not succumb to the desires of the warring sides has been a challenge that lot of previous presidents have faced, and he seems to handle with some success."

The fact that the president is much more popular in Israel than the prime minister himself was leverage that he employed to his benefit, the expert continues.

Currently Israel has agreed to releasing more than 1,000 detainees held in Israeli prisons and has agreed to a limited pullback from Gaza.

The group will free all the remaining hostages, living and dead, taken during the initial October 7 Hamas attack, which resulted in the loss of more than 1,200 Israeli citizens.

A conclusion to the war, which has led to the devastation of Gaza and the deaths of over 67,000 {Palestinians|Pal