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

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

Negotiations seemed to be collapsing.

Instead, it proved to be a key moment that culminated in a agreement, announced by President Donald Trump, to release all captives still held.

This is a objective that Trump, and Joe Biden previously, had pursued for almost 24 months.

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

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

Trump's unique style and key alliances with the Israeli government and the Middle Eastern nations appear to have contributed in this success.

But, as with many diplomatic achievements, there were also elements involved beyond the influence of either man.

A Close Relationship That Biden Never Had

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

Trump likes to say that Israel has no better friend, and the Israeli leader has called Trump as the country's "greatest ever ally in the White House". Moreover these positive statements have been matched by actions.

Throughout his first presidential term, the president relocated the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and discarded a long-held US position that Israeli settlements in the Palestinian West Bank are illegal, the view under international law.

When Israel began its air strikes against the Islamic Republic in the summer, Trump ordered American aircraft to target the nation's atomic sites with its largest non-nuclear weapons.

Those public demonstrations of backing may have allowed Trump the room to exert more influence on Israel in private. According to reports, Trump's envoy, Steve Witkoff, pressured the prime minister in the latter part of the year into agreeing to a halt in fighting in return for the freeing of a number of captives.

When Israel launched strikes against Syrian forces in July, even bombing a Christian church, Trump pressured his counterpart to alter tactics.

Trump displayed a degree of determination and insistence on an Israeli prime minister that is rarely seen, says an analyst of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "It's unheard of of an American president literally telling an Israeli prime minister that you're going to have to comply or else."

Biden's connection with Netanyahu's government was always more tenuous.

His administration's "bear hug approach" held that the US had to support the nation publicly in order to enable it to influence the nation's war conduct behind closed doors.

Beneath this was the president's nearly half-century of backing for Israel, as well as deep disagreements within his political base over the conflict in Gaza. Every step the leader took risked fracturing his own domestic support, whereas his successor's solid Republican base provided him more flexibility to act.

In the end, domestic politics or individual ties may have had less importance than the reality that, during Biden's presidency, Israel was unwilling to reach an agreement.

Eight months into his new administration, with Iran weakened, the militant group to its northern border significantly reduced and the coastal strip in ruins, all its key military goals had been achieved.

Commercial Background Assisted Secure Support from Arab States

The Israeli missile attack in the Qatari capital, which killed a Qatari citizen but no Hamas officials, led the president to deliver an final demand to Netanyahu. Hostilities had to end.

The US leader had given Israel a relatively free hand in the territory. He lent US armed support to Israeli operations in Iran. But an attack on Qatari territory was a separate issue entirely, pushing him towards the Arab position on how best to conclude the conflict.

Several administration figures have informed media outlets that this was a turning point which galvanised the leader to exert maximum pressure to finalize an agreement.

The leader's strong connections with the Gulf states are well documented. He has commercial interests with the emirate and the United Arab Emirates. The president began each of his administrations with state visits to the kingdom. This year, Trump also stopped in Qatar and the UAE capital.

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

His visits devoted in the cities of the Gulf region in recent months helped change his thinking, says an expert of the Council on Foreign Relations. The US president did not visit the country on this regional tour but visited the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the state where he heard consistent appeals to put a stop to the conflict.

Less than a month after that attack on the city, Trump sat close as Netanyahu personally phoned the Qatari leadership to apologise. Subsequently, the prime minister signed off on Trump's comprehensive proposal for Gaza - one that also had the support of influential Arab states in the area.

Assuming Trump's relationship with Netanyahu provided him the ability to influence Israel to reach an agreement, his history with Muslim leaders may have secured their support, and helped them convince the group to commit to the arrangement.

"One of the things that evidently occurred was that President Trump gained influence with the Israelis, and indirectly with the militants," says an analyst of the a research center.

"This was crucial. The capacity to do this on his timing, and avoid yielding to the desires of the combatants has been a challenge that lot of earlier administrations have struggled with, and Trump appears to do relatively successfully."

The fact that the president is much more popular in the nation than the prime minister himself was leverage that he used to his benefit, he adds.

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

The group will release all the captives still held, living and dead, taken in the initial October 7 Hamas attack, which resulted in the death of more than 1,200 Israelis.

A conclusion to the war, which has resulted in the destruction of Gaza and the deaths of over 67,000 {Palestinians|Pal