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Initially, the Israeli air strike on the Hamas negotiating team in Doha appeared like another escalation that drove the prospect of a ceasefire further away.

The attack on September 9 breached the territorial integrity of an American ally and threatened widening the conflict into a region-wide war.

Diplomacy appeared to be collapsing.

However, it proved to be a key moment that has led in a deal, announced by President Donald Trump, to release all remaining hostages.

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

This marks just the first step towards a lasting resolution, and the details of disarming Hamas, Gaza governance and complete Israeli pullout are still to be negotiated.

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

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 breakthrough.

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

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 greater ally, and Netanyahu has called Trump as the country's "most supportive friend in the US presidency". And these positive statements have been matched by actions.

Throughout his initial time in office, Trump moved the US embassy in the country from its former location to the contested capital and discarded a traditional American stance that Jewish communities in the Palestinian West Bank are against international law, the position under international law.

When Israel began its air strikes against the Islamic Republic in June, Trump ordered American aircraft to target the nation's atomic sites with its most powerful conventional bombs.

These visible shows of support may have allowed Trump the room to exert more influence on the Israeli government behind the scenes. According to reports, the president's negotiator, his representative, browbeat the prime minister in the latter part of the year into agreeing to a temporary ceasefire in exchange for the freeing of some hostages.

After Israel launched strikes against Syria's military in July, including hitting a Christian church, the US president urged his counterpart to change course.

The leader displayed a level of will and pressure on an Israeli prime minister that is virtually unprecedented, says 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 connection with Netanyahu's government was always more tenuous.

His administration's "bear hug strategy" argued that the US had to support the nation publicly in order to enable it to influence the nation's war conduct in private.

Beneath this was Biden's nearly half-century of backing for Israel, as well as sharp divisions within his Democratic coalition over the conflict in Gaza. Every step Biden took risked fracturing his own domestic support, while Trump's solid Republican base gave him more flexibility to manoeuvre.

Ultimately, internal considerations or personal relationships may have had less importance than the reality that, during his term, Israel was unwilling to make peace.

Several months into Trump's second term, with the Islamic Republic chastened, Hezbollah to its northern border greatly diminished and the coastal strip in ruins, every one of its key military goals had been achieved.

Commercial Background Helped Gain Support from Arab States

An Israeli strike in the Qatari capital, which resulted in the death of a local national but not the intended targets, led the president to issue an final demand to Netanyahu. Hostilities had to stop.

Trump had allowed the Israeli military a significant latitude in the territory. He provided American military might to Israel's campaign in Iran. However an attack on Qatari territory was a separate issue entirely, pushing him closer to the Arab position on how best to end the war.

A number of administration figures have informed the press that this was a turning point which galvanised the president to exert full force to finalize an agreement.

This US president's strong connections with the Gulf states are widely known. Trump has commercial interests with Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. He began both his presidential terms with official trips to the kingdom. This year, he also visited in Qatar and the UAE capital.

His normalization agreements, which established ties between the Jewish state and a number of Arab nations, including the UAE, was the biggest foreign policy success of his first term.

The time devoted in the cities of the Gulf region earlier this year helped shift his perspective, according to an expert of the Council on Foreign Relations. The US president did not travel to Israel on this Middle East trip but went to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar where he received repeated calls to put a stop to the war.

Less than a month after that Israeli strike on Doha, Trump was present nearby as Netanyahu personally called Qatar to apologise. Subsequently, the prime minister gave approval 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 Trump's alliance with Netanyahu gave him the ability to pressure Israel to strike a deal, his past with Arab rulers may have ensured their support, and assisted them convince the group to agree to the arrangement.

"One of the things that evidently occurred was that President Trump gained influence with the Israeli government, and through intermediaries with the militants," notes an analyst of the a research center.

"That made a difference. The capacity to achieve this on his timing, and not succumb to the desires of the combatants has been a problem that many previous presidents have struggled with, and Trump seems to do relatively successfully."

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

Now Israel has committed to releasing more than 1,000 detainees imprisoned in Israeli prisons and has agreed to a partial withdrawal from Gaza.

Hamas will free all the remaining hostages, both alive and deceased, taken during the original 7 October Hamas attack, which resulted in the death of over 1,200 Israelis.

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