🔗 Share this article

At first, the Israeli air strike on the Hamas negotiating team in Qatar seemed like yet another escalation that pushed the prospect of peace out of reach.

The attack on September 9 violated the territorial integrity of an US partner and threatened expanding the conflict into a region-wide war.

Negotiations appeared to be collapsing.

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

That represents a goal that Trump, and President Joe Biden before him, had sought for nearly two years.

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

Yet if this agreement stands, it could be Donald Trump's defining accomplishment of his second term - one that escaped Joe Biden and his administration.

The president's distinct approach and crucial relationships with Israel and the Middle Eastern nations seem to have contributed in this success.

However, as with many diplomatic achievements, there were also factors at play beyond the influence of both leaders.

A Close Relationship Which Eluded Biden

Publicly, Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are all smiles.

Trump often states that Israel has no greater ally, and the Israeli leader has described him as the country's "most supportive friend in the White House". Moreover these positive statements have been matched by deeds.

Throughout his first presidential term, Trump moved the US embassy in the country from Tel Aviv to the contested capital and discarded a long-held US position that Jewish communities in the Palestinian West Bank are illegal, the position under global norms.

After the Israeli military began its bombing campaign against Iran in the summer, Trump ordered US bombers to strike the nation's atomic sites with its largest non-nuclear weapons.

Those public demonstrations of support may have given Trump the leeway to apply more pressure on the Israeli government behind the scenes. According to reports, the president's envoy, Steve Witkoff, browbeat the prime minister in late 2024 into accepting a temporary ceasefire in exchange for the release of some hostages.

After Israel attacked against Syria's military in the summer, including bombing a place of worship, the US president urged Netanyahu to change course.

Trump exhibited a level of determination and pressure on an Israel's leader that is rarely seen, according to an analyst of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "There is no example of an American president directly instructing an Israeli leader that they must agree or else."

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

The Biden team's "close embrace approach" held that the US had to embrace the nation openly in order to enable it to influence the nation's military actions in private.

Beneath this was Biden's decades-long of support for the state, as well as deep disagreements within his political base over the conflict in Gaza. Each move the leader took risked fracturing his own political backing, whereas his successor's solid Republican base gave him more room to act.

Ultimately, internal considerations or individual ties may have had little impact than the simple fact that, throughout his term, Israel was unwilling to make peace.

Eight months into Trump's second term, with the Islamic Republic chastened, the militant group to its northern border greatly diminished and the coastal strip devastated, every one of its key military goals had been accomplished.

Commercial Background Helped Gain Gulf's Backing

An Israeli strike in Doha, which resulted in the death of a Qatari citizen but not the intended targets, led Trump to deliver an final demand to Netanyahu. The war had to stop.

The US leader had given the Israeli military a significant latitude in Gaza. The president lent American military might to Israel's campaign in the neighboring country. But an strike on Qatar soil was a separate issue entirely, pushing him closer to the Arab position on how best to end the war.

A number of Trump officials have told the press that this was a turning point which galvanised the president to exert maximum pressure to get a peace deal done.

This US president's close ties with the Arab monarchies are widely known. He has business dealings with the emirate and the United Arab Emirates. He began both his presidential terms with official trips to Saudi Arabia. This year, Trump also visited in Qatar and Abu Dhabi.

His normalization agreements, which established ties between the Jewish state and several Muslim states, including the UAE, was the most significant foreign policy success of his initial presidency.

His visits devoted in the capitals of the Arabian Peninsula earlier this year helped change his thinking, says an expert of the Council on Foreign Relations. 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 war.

Within weeks after that attack on the city, the president sat nearby as Netanyahu himself phoned Qatar to express regret. And later that day, the prime minister gave approval on Trump's 20-point peace plan for the territory - one that also had the backing of key Muslim nations in the area.

Assuming the president's alliance with his counterpart gave him the room to influence the government to strike a deal, his past with Muslim leaders may have secured their backing, and assisted them convince Hamas to commit to the deal.

"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 Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"This was crucial. The capacity to achieve this on his timing, and avoid yielding to the desires of the warring sides has been a challenge that lot of earlier administrations have struggled with, and he seems to do with some success."

The fact that Trump is far better liked in Israel than Netanyahu personally was leverage that Trump used to his advantage, the expert continues.

Now Israel has committed to freeing more than 1,000 detainees held in Israeli prisons and has consented to a limited pullback from the strip.

Hamas will free all the remaining hostages, living and dead, captured in the initial October 7 Hamas attack, which caused the death of over 1,200 Israelis.

An end to the conflict, which has led to the destruction of the territory and the deaths of over 67,000 {Palestinians|Pal