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At first, Israel's air strike on the Hamas delegation in Doha seemed like yet another escalation that drove the prospect of peace out of reach.

This strike on 9 September violated the sovereignty of an US partner and threatened expanding the conflict into a broader regional conflict.

Negotiations appeared to be in ruins.

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

This is a goal that Trump, and President Joe Biden previously, had sought for almost 24 months.

This marks just the first step towards a more durable peace, and the specifics of disarming Hamas, administering Gaza and complete Israeli pullout are still to be worked out.

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

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

However, as with many foreign policy wins, there were also factors involved beyond the control of either man.

Strong Ties That Eluded Biden

In public, Donald 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 called him as the country's "most supportive friend in the US presidency". Moreover these positive statements have been backed up by deeds.

During his initial time in office, Trump moved the US embassy in the country from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and discarded a traditional American stance that Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are against international law, the position under international law.

When the Israeli military began its air strikes against the Islamic Republic in the summer, Trump directed American aircraft to strike the Iran's atomic sites with its most powerful conventional bombs.

These visible shows of support may have given the president the leeway to apply more influence on Israel behind the scenes. As per sources, the president's envoy, Steve Witkoff, browbeat Netanyahu in the latter part of the year into agreeing to a halt in fighting in return for the release of a number of captives.

After Israel attacked against Syrian forces in the summer, including bombing a Christian church, the US president urged Netanyahu to alter tactics.

Trump displayed a level of will and insistence on an Israel's leader that is virtually unprecedented, says an analyst of the a think tank. "It's unheard of of an American president literally telling an Israeli prime minister that they must agree or else."

Joe Biden's connection with Netanyahu's government was consistently more strained.

His administration's "bear hug approach" held that the United States had to embrace the nation openly in order to enable it to influence the nation's war conduct in private.

Underneath this was the president's decades-long of backing for the state, as well as sharp divisions within his Democratic coalition over the conflict in Gaza. Every step the leader took endangered fracturing his own domestic support, while Trump's loyal conservative voters gave him more flexibility to act.

In the end, domestic politics or individual ties may have had little impact than the reality that, throughout his term, the Israeli government was not ready to reach an agreement.

Several months into his new administration, with the Islamic Republic chastened, Hezbollah to its immediate north greatly diminished and Gaza in ruins, every one of its key military goals had been accomplished.

Commercial Background Helped Secure Support from Arab States

The Israeli missile attack in the Qatari capital, which resulted in the death of a local national but no Hamas officials, prompted Trump to deliver an ultimatum to Netanyahu. The war had to end.

The US leader had given Israel a relatively free hand in Gaza. The president lent US armed support to Israeli operations in Iran. But an strike on Qatar soil was a different matter 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 motivated the president to exert full force to finalize an agreement.

This US president's close ties with the Arab monarchies are well documented. Trump has commercial interests with Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. He began both his presidential terms with state visits to Saudi Arabia. Recently, he also stopped in Doha and the UAE capital.

The president's normalization agreements, which normalised relations between Israel and several Muslim states, including the Emirates, was the biggest diplomatic achievement of his initial presidency.

The time he spent in the capitals of the Arabian Peninsula in recent months contributed to change his thinking, says an expert of the a policy institute. The US president did not travel to the country on this regional tour but went to the United Arab Emirates, the kingdom and the state where the leader received consistent appeals to bring an end to the conflict.

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

Assuming the president's alliance with his counterpart provided him the room to influence the government to reach an agreement, his past with Arab rulers may have secured their backing, and helped them persuade Hamas to commit to the arrangement.

"A key factor 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. His ability to achieve this on his timing, and not succumb to the desires of the warring sides has been a problem that lot of earlier administrations have struggled with, and he seems to handle with some success."

The fact that Trump is much more popular in Israel than Netanyahu personally was leverage that Trump employed to his benefit, the expert continues.

Now Israel has committed to freeing more than 1,000 Palestinians imprisoned in its jails and has consented to a limited pullback from Gaza.

The group will release all the remaining hostages, living and dead, captured during the initial October 7 assault, which caused the loss of more than 1,200 Israelis.

A conclusion to the conflict, which has led to the destruction of Gaza and the deaths of more than 67,000 {Palestinians|Pal