El-Sisi ratifies handover of islands to Saudi Arabia
CAIRO: Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi ratified a treaty that hands over two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia, the Cabinet said Saturday.
El-Sisi ratified the maritime border treaty days after Parliament approved the deal.
The treaty was first announced in April 2016.
The government has said the islands — Tiran and Sanafir — were Saudi to begin with, but were leased to Egypt in the 1950s.
“Nations are governed by constitutions and laws and legitimate rights, not whims or emotions,” the presidency had quoted El-Sisi as saying.
Lying at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba, the islands can be used to control access to the Israeli port of Eilat.
They were captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war before being returned to Egypt under the 1979 Camp David Accords.
Egypt is also facing a Daesh-led insurgency that has killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers, and dozens of Coptic Christians in church attacks.
Church bombing foiled Police said Saturday they foiled a church bombing by arresting a cell including the would-be attackers, two months after suicide bombers killed dozens of churchgoers in two attacks.
Six members of the extremist cell including two “suicide bombers” planning the attack on an Alexandria church were arrested in the Mediterranean city, the Interior Ministry said in a statement.
It said one attacker had planned to detonate an explosive vest inside the church and the other to blow himself up when police arrived at the scene.
Daesh had claimed responsibility for the two church bombings in April and one in December that killed more than seventy people.
On Thursday, the ministry said police killed seven suspected extremists in southern Egypt alleged to have been linked to the church attacks.