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At first, the Israeli aerial attack on the Hamas militant negotiating team in Qatar appeared like yet another escalation that pushed the prospect of peace out of reach.

The attack on 9 September violated the territorial integrity of an US partner and threatened widening the hostilities into a broader regional conflict.

Diplomacy seemed to be collapsing.

However, it turned out to be a key moment that culminated in a agreement, declared by President Donald Trump, to free all captives still held.

This is a objective that Trump, and Joe Biden previously, had sought for nearly two years.

This marks just the initial phase towards a more durable peace, and the specifics of disarming Hamas, administering Gaza and full Israeli withdrawal are still to be worked out.

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

The president's unique style and key alliances with the Israeli government and the Middle Eastern nations seem to have played a role in this success.

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

Strong Ties That Biden Never Had

In public, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are all smiles.

Trump often states that the nation has no greater ally, and Netanyahu has described Trump as the country's "greatest ever ally in the White House". Moreover these warm words have been backed up by actions.

Throughout 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 position under international law.

When Israel began its air strikes against the Islamic Republic in the summer, the US leader directed American aircraft to strike the nation's atomic sites with its most powerful conventional bombs.

Those public demonstrations of backing may have allowed Trump the leeway to exert more pressure on the Israeli government in private. According to reports, the president's envoy, his representative, pressured Netanyahu in the latter part of the year into accepting a halt in fighting in exchange for the release of a number of captives.

After Israel launched strikes against Syrian forces in the summer, even hitting a Christian church, Trump pressured his counterpart to change course.

Trump exhibited a level of determination 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 American president directly instructing an Israeli prime minister that you're going to have to comply or else."

Joe Biden's relationship with Netanyahu's government was always more tenuous.

His administration's "close embrace strategy" held that the US had to support the nation openly in order to allow it to moderate the country's military actions behind closed doors.

Beneath this was Biden's decades-long 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 domestic support, while his successor's loyal conservative voters provided him more flexibility to manoeuvre.

In the end, internal considerations or individual ties may have had less importance than the reality that, throughout Biden's presidency, the Israeli government was not ready to reach an agreement.

Several months into Trump's second term, with Iran chastened, Hezbollah to its immediate north greatly diminished and Gaza in ruins, every one of its key military goals had been achieved.

Business History Assisted Gain Gulf's Backing

An Israeli strike in Doha, which resulted in the death of a local national but no Hamas officials, led the president to deliver an final demand to Netanyahu. The war had to end.

Trump had allowed Israel a relatively free hand in Gaza. He provided US armed support to Israel's campaign in the neighboring country. But an strike on Qatar soil was a separate issue completely, pushing him closer to the Arab position on how best to end the war.

Several Trump officials have informed media outlets that this was a decisive moment which galvanised the leader to apply maximum pressure to get a peace deal done.

The leader's close ties with the Arab monarchies are well documented. He has business dealings with the emirate and the UAE. He began each of his administrations with state visits to Saudi Arabia. Recently, he also visited in Doha and the UAE capital.

The president's Abraham Accords, which normalised relations between the Jewish state and several Muslim states, such as the Emirates, was the biggest foreign policy success of his first term.

His visits devoted in the cities of the Gulf region earlier this year contributed to change his thinking, according to an expert of the Council on Foreign Relations. The US president did not travel to Israel on this Middle East trip but visited the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar where the leader heard consistent appeals to put a stop to the war.

Less than a month after that Israeli strike on the city, the president was present nearby as the prime minister personally phoned the Qatari leadership to express regret. Subsequently, the prime minister signed off on the president's comprehensive proposal for the territory - one that also had the support of influential Arab states in the region.

If Trump's alliance with his counterpart gave him the room to pressure Israel to reach an agreement, his past with Muslim leaders may have secured their backing, and helped them persuade the group to agree to the arrangement.

"A key factor that clearly happened was that President Trump gained leverage with the Israelis, and indirectly with Hamas," says Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"This was crucial. The capacity to achieve this on his own schedule, and avoid yielding to the desires of the combatants has been a challenge that many earlier administrations have struggled with, and he appears to handle with some success."

The reality that the president is much more popular in Israel than the prime minister personally was an advantage that he used to his benefit, he adds.

Currently the Israeli government has committed to releasing over a thousand detainees imprisoned in Israeli prisons and has agreed to a partial withdrawal from the strip.

Hamas will release all the remaining hostages, both alive and deceased, captured during the original 7 October assault, which resulted in the loss of over 1,200 Israelis.

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