A country will join the Abraham Accords today, a process initiated by US President Donald Trump during his first term that has led to the normalization of relations between several Arab countries and Israel, US special envoy Steve Witkoff said.
"I'm going back to Washington tonight because we're going to announce that another country is joining the Abraham Accords," Witkoff said during a roundtable in Miami, declining to specify which country.
According to the news website Axios, that is Kazakhstan. The country, which is participating tonight with other Central Asian states in a summit with the US president, already has diplomatic relations with Israel.
The goal of the agreement is to deepen these relations, according to an unnamed senior US official quoted by Axios. The Abraham Accords process is a diplomatic priority for the US president.
"A lot of people are joining that agreement and I hope we'll have Saudi Arabia soon," Trump said on Wednesday.
He has also been pressuring Syria, whose President Ahmad al-Sharah he is due to meet with on Monday, to join this diplomatic initiative.
The agreement in 2020 led to the normalization of relations between Israel and several Arab countries: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan.
However, many countries have so far refused to join the process, notably Saudi Arabia, as well as Syria and Lebanon, Israel's neighbors.
With the war in the Gaza Strip triggered by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Riyadh has ruled out any normalization with Israel without the creation of a sovereign and viable Palestinian state, a project opposed by the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
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