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At first, the Israeli air strike on the Hamas negotiating team in Doha seemed like yet another escalation that drove the hope of peace further away.

The attack on 9 September breached the territorial integrity of an American ally and threatened widening the conflict into a broader regional conflict.

Diplomacy seemed to be in ruins.

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

That represents a goal that Trump, and President Joe Biden before him, had sought for almost 24 months.

It is just the first step towards a more durable peace, and the specifics of disarming Hamas, Gaza governance and full Israeli withdrawal are still to be negotiated.

But if this deal stands, it could be Donald Trump's signature achievement of his return to office - one that escaped Biden and his administration.

The president's distinct approach and crucial relationships with the Israeli government and the Arab world appear to have contributed in this breakthrough.

However, as with most foreign policy wins, there were also elements involved beyond the influence of both leaders.

Strong Ties Which Biden Never Had

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

Trump likes to say that the nation has no better friend, and Netanyahu has described Trump as the country's "greatest ever ally in the US presidency". Moreover these positive statements have been backed up by actions.

Throughout his initial time in office, the president moved the American diplomatic mission in the country from its former location to Jerusalem and abandoned a traditional American stance that Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are against international law, the position under global norms.

After Israel began its bombing campaign against the Islamic Republic in the summer, the US leader ordered US bombers to strike the nation's atomic sites with its most powerful conventional bombs.

These public demonstrations of support may have given the president the leeway to exert more influence on the Israeli government behind the scenes. As per sources, Trump's negotiator, his representative, browbeat 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.

After Israel launched strikes against Syrian forces in the summer, even bombing a Christian church, Trump pressured Netanyahu to alter tactics.

The leader displayed 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. "It's unheard of of an American president literally telling 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 strained.

The Biden team's "bear hug approach" argued that the US had to embrace the nation publicly in order to allow it to influence the country's military actions behind closed doors.

Beneath this was the president's decades-long of backing for Israel, as well as deep disagreements within his political base over the Gaza War. Every step Biden took endangered fracturing his own political backing, while Trump's solid Republican base provided him more room to manoeuvre.

Ultimately, internal considerations or personal relationships may have had less importance than the simple fact that, during Biden's presidency, the Israeli government was unwilling to reach an agreement.

Several months into his new administration, with the Islamic Republic weakened, Hezbollah to its immediate north significantly reduced and Gaza devastated, every one of its key military goals had been achieved.

Commercial Background Assisted Secure Support from Arab States

An Israeli strike in Doha, which killed a local national but no Hamas officials, led Trump to issue an ultimatum to Netanyahu. The war had to end.

The US leader had given the Israeli military a relatively free hand in the territory. He provided American military might to Israeli operations in Iran. But an attack on Qatar soil was a different matter entirely, moving him closer to the Arab position on how best to conclude the conflict.

Several Trump officials have told the press that this was a decisive moment which motivated the president to exert full force to get a peace deal done.

The leader's close ties with the Arab monarchies are well documented. Trump has business dealings with the emirate and the United Arab Emirates. He began both his presidential terms with state visits to Saudi Arabia. Recently, Trump also visited in Qatar and the UAE capital.

The president's normalization agreements, which established ties between the Jewish state and a number of Arab nations, such as the Emirates, was the biggest diplomatic achievement of his first term.

The time devoted in the cities of the Gulf region in recent months helped change his thinking, says Ed Husain of the a policy institute. Trump did not visit Israel on this Middle East trip but went to the United Arab Emirates, the kingdom and the state where he heard repeated calls to bring an end to the conflict.

Less than a month after that attack on the city, the president was present close as the prime minister himself called the Qatari leadership to apologise. Subsequently, the prime minister signed off on Trump's 20-point peace plan for the territory - one that also had the support of key Muslim nations in the area.

If Trump's alliance with his counterpart provided him the ability to influence the government to reach an agreement, his history with Muslim leaders may have secured their backing, and helped them convince Hamas to agree to the deal.

"One of the things that evidently occurred was that President Trump developed influence with the Israelis, and through intermediaries with Hamas," says Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"This was crucial. His ability to do this on his timing, and avoid yielding to the desires of the combatants has been a problem that lot of earlier administrations have struggled with, and Trump seems to handle with some success."

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

Currently the Israeli government has agreed to releasing over a thousand Palestinians held in its jails and has consented to a partial withdrawal from the strip.

The group will release all the remaining hostages, living and dead, captured in the original 7 October assault, which resulted in the loss of more than 1,200 Israeli citizens.

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