WASHINGTON

A new country will formally join normalization deals with Israel that are collectively known as the Abraham Accords, US President Donald Trump's special envoy announced Thursday.

Steve Witkoff declined to specify which country would be joining, but said the announcement would be made Thursday evening at an event that he is returning to Washington to attend.

"I'm flying back to Washington tonight because we're going to announce tonight, another country coming into the Abraham Accords," Witkoff said during a business forum in Miami, Florida.

Trump is slated to host the leaders of five Central Asian countries -- Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan -- at the White House on Thursday evening. It is unclear if the announcement will come during the dinner, but the US president is all but certain to attend any major announcement.

The Abraham Accords are normalization agreements signed between Israel and several Muslim-majority countries during Trump's first term. Currently, four nations have joined the peace agreements: Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates.

The Axios news website reported that the nation that will join the accords is Kazakhstan, which has held diplomatic relations with Israel since 1992. But an anonymous US official told Axios that the country's formal entrance into the agreements is being done to reinvigorate the normalization push.

"This is going to show that the Abraham Accords is a club that many countries want to be a member of and it will be a step for turning the page on the war in Gaza and moving forward towards more peace and cooperation in the region," the US official said.

The announcement will come as Israel faces international ties that have been significantly damaged by its two-year war in the Gaza Strip, where nearly 70,000 Palestinians have been killed.

Multiple nations have either broken diplomatic ties with Tel Aviv or unilaterally recognized Palestine in response to the war.