Throughout the current conflict, Benjamin Netanyahu has had a strained relationship with hostage-advocacy groups, who have have said repeatedly that he hasn’t done enough to free their loved ones. That will be a harder claim to make after this week.

The events that nearly derailed the cease-fire began with a series of hostage releases over the past few weeks. Crowds of possessed Gazans shouted at and jeered and taunted female captives, then an elderly captive was subject to similarly dangerous mob hysterics, despite the Israeli government’s protestations. All the while the freed captives were dragged through a humiliating Hamas propaganda ceremony each week.

Then last weekend, Hamas set off gasps of horror around the world as it released three emaciated hostages in a scene reminiscent of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. Hamas fighters forced at gunpoint one of the captives to say he was looking forward to finally seeing his wife and children again while those fighters laughed at him—Hamas had murdered his wife and children and had never informed him.

The scenes were horrid, but so were the implications: Each week, the freed captives are in worse physical and mental shape than those who were freed the week prior. That meant Hamas’s maltreatment, torture, starvation, and dehydration was putting every remaining living hostage close to death. Hamas panicked, suggesting it did not have in its possession any remaining hostages who were in noticeably better condition than the ones who evoked comparisons to Holocaust survivors.

So Hamas suspended the deal.

Some in Israel began pointing fingers at their own government: “Hundreds have gathered to protest and light bonfires outside Tel Aviv’s Kirya military headquarters following Hamas’s announcement that it would postpone the release of hostages on February 15,” the Jerusalem Post reported.

An opposition politician, Yair Golan, took the bait as well: “As expected, the unwritten alliance between Hamas and the failed prime minister is working again.”

The assumption here, again, was that Netanyahu was looking for an excuse to end the cease-fire and restart the war instead of working to bring home more hostages, despite the fact that the suspension was announced by Hamas.

If Netanyahu wanted to keep the hostage releases going, he now had a problem: The public protests against him reduced some of his leverage against Hamas, because Hamas realized it could hold onto the hostages and if anything happened to them it would be blamed on Netanyahu.

Enter Donald Trump. The president was asked about Hamas’s threat to suspend the cease-fire, and Trump made clear he had run out of patience with Hamas. In fact, his comments strongly suggested he believed the deal was already weighted in Hamas’s favor, since the hostages were being released in “drips and drabs” and Israel was pulling out of all of Gaza except a buffer zone on the border. Trump, whose envoy had negotiated the deal at the president’s direction, was telling Hamas that it had better not try to make a fool of him on the world stage.

“As far as I’m concerned,” Trump said, “if all of the hostages aren’t returned by Saturday at 12 o’clock—I think it’s an appropriate time—I would say, cancel it and all bets are off and let hell break out.” Hamas wasn’t the only one who could change the terms of the deal.

In doing so, Trump was taking some of the responsibility off of Netanyahu’s shoulders—if the war was going to restart, it would do so on Trump’s terms. If Netanyahu preferred that option, he could simply do nothing and wait.

But if he wanted to keep the cease-fire deal going, he had a new problem: Trump demanded the release of all the hostages at once. That was unlikely to happen this week.

In order to simply get the existing deal back on track, Netanyahu would have to reduce Trump’s demands without undermining the president’s negotiating authority. So the Israeli government put out a series of statements with vague language to buy it time to strategize with the White House. Then Netanyahu essentially put himself as the mediator between Trump and Hamas so that any reduction in America’s demands was seen as coming from the White House, preserving Trump’s place as the senior partner in the alliance.

In the end, the sides agreed that Hamas would release three hostages as originally planned and Trump gave his blessing without removing the implicit threat of his own impatience with Hamas: “If it was up to me, I’d take a very hard stance. I can’t tell you what Israel is going to do,” Trump told reporters this afternoon. Thus Trump can play off his initial threat as simply what he would do if he were in Israel’s shoes, not what he was planning on doing as U.S. president. Netanyahu looks reasonable but not weak. Hamas is back in compliance with the deal.

Had Netanyahu truly wanted the deal to collapse this week, it would have—because Hamas was the one who suspended the deal and Netanyahu had Trump’s backing to go back to war. The only reason that didn’t happen was because Netanyahu preferred the deal to restarting the war. Hopefully that will earn him some credit with the hostage families who have been suspicious of his motives until now.