🔗 Share this article

Initially, Israel's aerial attack on the Hamas negotiating team in Doha appeared like another escalation that pushed the hope of peace out of reach.

The attack on 9 September violated the sovereignty of an US partner and risked widening the hostilities into a region-wide war.

Negotiations seemed to be collapsing.

However, it proved to be a key moment that has led in a agreement, announced by President Donald Trump, to free all captives still held.

That represents a goal that Trump, and Joe Biden previously, 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 remain to be worked out.

Yet if this agreement holds, it could be Donald Trump's defining accomplishment of his return to office - one that eluded Biden and his administration.

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

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

Strong Ties Which Biden Never Had

Publicly, Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are consistently friendly.

The president likes to say that the nation has no better friend, and Netanyahu has described Trump as the country's "greatest ever ally in the White House". Moreover these positive statements have been matched by deeds.

During his first presidential term, the president moved the US embassy in the country from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and discarded a long-held US position that Jewish communities in the occupied territories are illegal, the position under global norms.

After the Israeli military began its air strikes against Iran in June, the US leader ordered US bombers to strike the nation's atomic sites with its largest non-nuclear weapons.

These public demonstrations of support may have given Trump the room to exert more influence on the Israeli government in private. As per sources, the president's negotiator, Steve Witkoff, pressured the prime minister in late 2024 into agreeing to a halt in fighting in return for the freeing of some hostages.

When Israel attacked against Syria's military in July, even hitting a Christian church, the US president urged his counterpart to alter tactics.

Trump exhibited a degree of determination and pressure on an Israel's leader that is virtually unprecedented, says an analyst of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "It's unheard of of an American president directly instructing an Israeli leader that they must agree or else."

Biden's connection with the Israeli administration was consistently more strained.

His administration's "close embrace approach" argued that the US had to support Israel publicly in order to allow it to influence the country's war conduct behind closed doors.

Beneath this was the president's decades-long of backing for Israel, as well as deep disagreements within his Democratic coalition over the conflict in Gaza. Every step the leader took risked dividing his own domestic support, while Trump's solid Republican base provided him more flexibility to act.

Ultimately, internal considerations or individual ties may have had less importance than the simple fact that, during Biden's presidency, Israel was not ready to make peace.

Eight months into Trump's second term, with the Islamic Republic weakened, Hezbollah to its northern border significantly reduced and the coastal strip devastated, every one of its major strategy objectives had been accomplished.

Commercial Background Assisted Secure Gulf's Backing

An Israeli strike in Doha, which killed a local national but no Hamas officials, led Trump to deliver an ultimatum to the prime minister. The war had to stop.

Trump had allowed the Israeli military a relatively free hand in Gaza. The president lent American military might to Israeli operations in Iran. However an strike on Qatar soil was a different matter entirely, pushing him towards the stance of Arab nations on how best to conclude the conflict.

Several administration figures have told media outlets that this was a decisive moment which galvanised the president to apply full force to get a peace deal done.

This US president's close ties with the Gulf states are well documented. Trump has commercial interests with the emirate and the UAE. He began each of his administrations with official trips to the kingdom. Recently, Trump also visited in Qatar and the UAE capital.

His Abraham Accords, which normalised relations between the Jewish state and a number of Arab nations, including the Emirates, was the biggest diplomatic achievement of his initial presidency.

His visits he spent in the cities of the Arabian Peninsula earlier this year helped change his thinking, according to Ed Husain of the Council on Foreign Relations. Trump did not visit the country on this Middle East trip but visited the UAE, the kingdom and Qatar where the leader received consistent appeals to bring an end to the conflict.

Within weeks after that Israeli strike on Doha, Trump sat close as the prime minister personally phoned the Qatari leadership to apologise. And later that day, the Israeli leader signed off on the president's 20-point peace plan for the territory - one that additionally had the support of influential Arab states in the region.

If the president's alliance with Netanyahu gave him the ability to influence Israel to strike a deal, his history with Muslim leaders may have secured their backing, and helped them convince the group to commit to the deal.

"One of the things that evidently occurred was that President Trump developed influence with the Israelis, and through intermediaries with the militants," notes Jon Alterman of the a research center.

"That made a difference. The capacity to achieve this on his own schedule, and avoid yielding to the demands of the combatants has been a problem that lot of previous presidents have faced, and Trump appears to handle with some success."

The reality that the president is much more popular in Israel than the prime minister himself was an advantage that he used to his advantage, he adds.

Currently the Israeli government has committed to freeing over a thousand Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli prisons and has consented to a limited pullback from the strip.

Hamas will free all the remaining hostages, both alive and deceased, taken in the original 7 October Hamas attack, which caused the loss of more than 1,200 Israeli citizens.

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