The Way Trump Secured a Gaza Strip Breakthrough That Escaped Joe Biden

Initially, Israel's air strike on the Hamas militant negotiating team in Doha seemed like another intensification that drove the prospect of a ceasefire further away.

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

Negotiations appeared to be in ruins.

However, it turned out to be a key moment that has led in a deal, declared by President Donald Trump, to free all captives still held.

This is a goal that Trump, and President 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, Gaza governance and full Israeli withdrawal remain to be worked out.

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

Trump's distinct approach and crucial relationships with Israel and the Middle Eastern nations seem to have played a role in this breakthrough.

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 Benjamin Netanyahu are consistently friendly.

The president often states that Israel has no better friend, and the Israeli leader has described him as the country's "greatest ever ally in the White House". And these positive statements have been backed up by deeds.

Throughout his initial time in office, Trump moved the American diplomatic mission in Israel from its former location to the contested capital and abandoned a traditional American stance that Jewish communities in the Palestinian West Bank are illegal, the position under global norms.

After Israel began its air strikes against the Islamic Republic in June, the US leader ordered American aircraft to strike the nation's atomic sites with its largest non-nuclear weapons.

Those public demonstrations of backing may have given the president the room to exert more pressure on the Israeli government in private. According to reports, Trump's negotiator, his representative, pressured Netanyahu in the latter part of the year into agreeing to a temporary ceasefire in return for the release of some hostages.

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

The leader displayed a level of determination and insistence on an Israeli prime minister that is virtually unprecedented, says Aaron David Miller of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "There is no example of an US leader literally telling an Israeli leader that they must agree or else."

Joe Biden's relationship with Netanyahu's government was consistently more tenuous.

His administration's "close embrace strategy" held that the United States had to embrace Israel openly in order to allow it to influence the nation's war conduct behind closed doors.

Beneath this was the president's decades-long of support for the state, as well as sharp divisions within his Democratic coalition over the conflict in Gaza. Each move Biden took risked dividing his own domestic support, while his successor's solid Republican base provided him more room to manoeuvre.

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 reach an agreement.

Several months into his new administration, with the Islamic Republic chastened, the militant group to its northern border significantly reduced and the coastal strip devastated, all its key military goals had been accomplished.

Business History Helped Gain Gulf's Backing

An Israeli strike in the Qatari capital, which killed a local national but no Hamas officials, led the president to deliver an ultimatum to the prime minister. The war had to end.

The US leader had given the Israeli military a relatively free hand in the territory. The president provided US armed support to Israeli operations in Iran. However an strike on Qatar soil was a separate issue entirely, pushing him closer to the stance of Arab nations on how best to end the war.

A number of Trump officials have informed the press that this was a turning point which motivated the president to exert full force to finalize an agreement.

The leader's strong connections with the Gulf states are widely known. Trump has commercial interests with the emirate and the United Arab Emirates. The president began each of his administrations with official trips to the kingdom. Recently, he also visited in Qatar and Abu Dhabi.

The president's Abraham Accords, which normalised relations between Israel and a number of Arab nations, including the UAE, was the most significant foreign policy success of his initial presidency.

His visits devoted in the cities of the Gulf region earlier this year contributed to shift his perspective, according to Ed Husain of the Council on Foreign Relations. The US president did not visit Israel on this Middle East trip but went to the UAE, the kingdom and Qatar where he received consistent appeals to put a stop to the conflict.

Within weeks after that attack on Doha, the president sat nearby as the prime minister personally phoned the Qatari leadership to apologise. And later that day, the Israeli leader signed off on Trump's comprehensive proposal for Gaza - one that additionally had the backing of influential Arab states in the area.

If Trump's alliance with Netanyahu provided him the room to pressure Israel to strike a deal, his history with Arab rulers may have ensured their support, and helped them convince the group to agree to the deal.

"One of the things that clearly happened was that President Trump developed leverage with the Israelis, and through intermediaries with the militants," notes an analyst of the a research center.

"This was crucial. The capacity to do this on his own schedule, and not succumb to the demands of the combatants has been a challenge that lot of earlier administrations have struggled with, and Trump seems to handle relatively successfully."

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

Now the Israeli government has agreed to releasing more than 1,000 Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli prisons and has agreed to a limited pullback from Gaza.

Hamas will free all the captives still held, 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 led to the devastation of the territory and the fatalities of more than 67,000 {Palestinians|Pal