The Way Trump Achieved a Gaza Strip Breakthrough That Eluded Biden

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

This strike on September 9 breached the territorial integrity of an American ally and threatened expanding the conflict into a region-wide war.

Diplomacy seemed to be in ruins.

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

This is a goal that Trump, and Joe Biden before him, had sought for nearly two years.

It is just the initial phase towards a lasting resolution, and the details of disarming Hamas, administering Gaza and complete Israeli pullout are still to be negotiated.

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

Trump's unique style and key alliances with Israel and the Arab world seem to have played a role in this breakthrough.

But, as with most foreign policy wins, there were also elements involved beyond the influence of either man.

Strong Ties That Biden Never Had

Publicly, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are all smiles.

The president likes to say that the nation has no better friend, and the Israeli leader has described Trump as Israel's "most supportive friend in the US presidency". And these warm words have been matched by deeds.

During his first presidential term, the president moved the American diplomatic mission in the country from its former location to the contested capital and discarded a long-held US position that Jewish communities in the Palestinian West Bank are against international law, the position under international law.

When the Israeli military began its air strikes against the Islamic Republic in June, the US leader ordered US bombers to target the nation's nuclear enrichment facilities with its most powerful conventional bombs.

Those public demonstrations of support may have given the president the leeway to apply more influence on Israel in private. As per sources, the president's envoy, Steve Witkoff, pressured Netanyahu in the latter part of the year into agreeing to a halt in fighting in exchange for the freeing of some hostages.

After Israeli forces attacked against Syrian forces in the summer, including hitting a Christian church, Trump urged his counterpart to alter tactics.

Trump displayed a degree of determination and insistence on an Israel's leader that is rarely seen, according to an analyst of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "It's unheard of of an US leader literally telling an Israeli leader that they must agree or else."

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

The Biden team's "close embrace strategy" argued that the US had to support Israel publicly in order to allow it to moderate the country'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. Every step the leader took risked dividing his own domestic support, whereas his successor's solid Republican base provided him more flexibility to act.

In the end, domestic politics or individual ties may have had less importance than the reality that, during Biden's presidency, the Israeli government was not ready to make peace.

Several months into his new administration, with the Islamic Republic chastened, the militant group to its immediate north greatly diminished and Gaza in ruins, all its major strategy objectives had been achieved.

Commercial Background Helped Secure Gulf's Backing

The Israeli missile attack in the Qatari capital, which killed a Qatari citizen but not the intended targets, prompted the president to issue an ultimatum to Netanyahu. Hostilities had to stop.

The US leader had given Israel a relatively free hand in Gaza. The president provided US armed support to Israeli operations in the neighboring country. However an strike on Qatar soil was a different matter entirely, pushing him closer to the Arab position on how best to conclude the conflict.

A number of Trump officials have told media outlets that this was a decisive moment which motivated the president to exert maximum pressure to get a peace deal done.

This US president's strong connections with the Arab monarchies are well documented. He has commercial interests with the emirate and the United Arab Emirates. The president began both his presidential terms with official trips to Saudi Arabia. Recently, he also stopped in Doha and Abu Dhabi.

His Abraham Accords, which established ties between Israel and a number of Arab nations, such as the Emirates, was the biggest foreign policy success of his first term.

His visits devoted 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 travel to the country on this regional tour but visited the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar where the leader heard repeated calls to put a stop to the war.

Within weeks after that attack on Doha, the president sat nearby as the prime minister himself phoned Qatar to express regret. And later that day, the Israeli leader gave approval on Trump's comprehensive proposal for Gaza - one that additionally had the backing of key Muslim nations in the area.

Assuming Trump's alliance with his counterpart gave him the ability to influence the government to reach an agreement, his history with Arab rulers may have ensured their support, and assisted them persuade Hamas to commit to the arrangement.

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

"This was crucial. The capacity to achieve this on his own schedule, and not succumb to the desires of the warring sides has been a problem that many previous presidents have struggled with, and he seems to handle with some success."

The reality that the president is far better liked in the nation than Netanyahu personally was an advantage that Trump employed to his benefit, he adds.

Now the Israeli government has agreed to freeing over a thousand detainees held in Israeli prisons and has consented to a limited pullback from the strip.

The group will release all the captives still held, both alive and deceased, taken in the original 7 October Hamas attack, which resulted in the loss of more than 1,200 Israeli citizens.

An end to the war, which has led to the destruction of the territory and the fatalities of more than 67,000 {Palestinians|Pal