It was a subtle, but significant flex of power by Donald Trump’s new envoy to the Middle East. Ten days before tomorrow’s presidential inauguration, he called Israel to announce he was coming to Tel Aviv to meet Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump had demanded a deal to release Israel’s hostages before he took his oath of office, and the man charged with making that happen was Steve Witkoff – a New York property developer confident that a long relationship with Trump could offset a lack of diplomatic experience.

He landed last Saturday, in the middle of the Jewish Sabbath, when the Israeli prime minister does not take on official duties. Netanyahu’s aides told Witkoff he would have to wait a few hours for a meeting.

Witkoff, who is Jewish, made clear that would not be happening. Trump was in a hurry – and he wanted to get on with the mission.

Two days earlier, the president-elect had shared a video of the economist Jeffrey Sachs calling Netanyahu a “deep, dark son of a bitch”, just weeks after the Israeli leader claimed the two had a “warm” policy discussion. Around the world, governments are recalibrating policy to reflect Trump’s bluntly transactional approach to international relations – and Israel is no exception. Netanyahu took the meeting.

Trump’s first administration delivered key diplomatic concessions, including recognising Jerusalem as the Israeli capital and Israel’s sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights. But he does not have the ideological commitment of the outgoing president, Joe Biden, who has described himself as a Zionist.

Early in December, Trump warned on social media – in capital letters – that there would be “ALL HELL TO PAY” if the hostages were not released by 20 January.

At the start of the new year, Hamas supplied a list of hostages who would be released in a deal, something Israel had long been seeking. It was taken as a sign the group were serious about the talks.

When Witkoff sat down with Netanyahu, he made it clear what Trump expected from his government. He told the Israeli leader: “The president has been a great friend of Israel, and now it’s time to be a friend back,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

After that meeting, Netanyahu ordered a delegation to Doha, Qatar, including spy chiefs and a top aide, with a mandate to reach a deal. It was the beginning of the final, unlikely stretch in negotiations that had lasted more than a year.

Last Sunday, talks began.

The two teams of negotiators set off each day from their separate hotels to the same Qatari government residence, where they had rooms on separate floors to ensure they never came face to face.

The mediators – Qataris, Egyptians and Americans – shuttled up and down between the two delegations during talks that stretched on throughout the night, on the longest day ending only at 4am.

The deal looked within reach by Wednesday, but a planned press conference with the Qatari prime minister, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, was pushed back again and again, as talks went down to the wire.

When Thani finally stepped out on to Doha the podium early Wednesday evening, it was only minutes after the deal had been agreed. Witkoff had been by his side throughout, reminding everyone – if only by his presence – of Trump’s demands.

The incoming president wanted to mark his return to the White House with a display of American power and personal prestige.

It was clear the war in Ukraine, which he had once boasted of ending in 24 hours, would need a little more time.

The ceasefire and hostage release deal for Gaza that had been hammered out by Biden’s team months earlier, but never sealed, offered a tempting alternative. It was equally high profile but perhaps more achievable than a Ukrainian deal because it sought – for now – to pause the conflict in Gaza, not end it definitively.

The first stage allows for the release of hostages and Palestinian prisoners during a halt to fighting, and a surge in aid into Gaza. The most difficult questions about the future of Gaza, including how it will be governed and whether Israeli forces will keep a foothold, have been left open, to be tackled in the second stage of negotiations.

That left room for both Israel and Hamas to claim some form of victory, while also raising serious questions about how long the deal will last. But it will bring desperately needed relief to Palestinians in Gaza and the families of some hostages who return home.

That made it goal enough to bring two American presidents into an unlikely but productive alliance. If both have rushed to claim the end of the war as their legacy, the reality is that it took both to finally push the deal over the line.

It was more than a year in the making, with the broad details hammered out in December 2023, soon after a previous ceasefire and hostage release deal collapsed. In the months that followed, Biden’s team hammered out more details and in May announced it to the world, claimed Israeli support and got UN endorsement.

Then negotiations collapsed, in a “whirlpool” of acceptance and rejection, where each tiny shift in language to bring the more reluctant side on board pushed the other side away. At one point, the Qataris said they were stepping back from mediation that seemed to be going nowhere.

A senior US administration official defended the Biden team’s months-long effort to secure a ceasefire, saying events disrupted the negotiations several times when a deal seemed within reach, including the deaths of six hostages in a tunnel under Gaza in August.

At the time “we basically concluded that so long as [Hamas leader and military commander] Yahya Sinwar was alive, we are not going to get a deal for a ceasefire hostage release,” the official said.

A few months later, Sinwar and Lebanon-based Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had both been killed, and Iranian ally Bashar al-Assad had fled from Syria. That allowed the US to pressure Hamas in a “significantly transformed” region in which the militant group understood that the “cavalry” was not coming to help it.

After Trump’s election victory, Biden proposed the two work together on a deal. The final push was “historically almost unprecedented, and it was a highly constructive, very fruitful partnership”, between the two camps, said the administration official.

The deal, they said, “was the fruition of many months, really, over a year of developments in the Middle East and extensive, extraordinary diplomacy”.

US and Israeli outlets reported Netanyahu received US concessions for signing the deal, including a pledge he will have US backing to continue the war in Gaza if negotiations on a second phase of the deal fail, and a promise to repeal US sanctions on settlers and extremist groups.

Both might help defuse resistance from far-right cabinet ministers who have sworn the war can only end with the “destruction” of Hamas. Their parties prop up Netanyahu’s government.

But there has been no confirmation of Trump offering Netanyahu a quid pro quo for the deal, and analysis has instead focused on the political dynamics at play between the two men.

The Israeli prime minister is “scared” of antagonising Trump, according to a European diplomat.

“They’ve had maximum support during this war and what comes next is not so certain,” the diplomat said. “They need to work with Trump now. At least in the beginning.”