The distorting the image of Islam is due to the rise of extremist attacks, President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi said in a meeting a delegation of preachers and religious personnel on Tuesday.

The Islamic State group has beheaded the 82-year-old former antiquities director for the ancient city of Palmyra, Syria's antiquities chief and a monitor said. Photos purporting to show Khaled al-Assaad's body tied to a post in Palmyra were circulated online by IS supporters. Syria's antiquities chief Maamoun Abdelkarim told AFP that Assaad was executed by the jihadist group on Tuesday afternoon in Palmyra, in central Homs province.

Egyptian authorities on Wednesday released a Hamas leader after detaining him a day earlier, an Egyptian diplomatic source told Anadolu Agency.

Fighters of the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) militants have reestablished dominance over the Libyan city of Sirte after using brutal force to suppress a rebellion by residents of the city in recent days.

A New Cairo prosecution released photographer Ahmed Ramadan on bail late Monday, after a former work colleague had instigated his arrest by telling the police he belonged to a terrorist organisation.

Seven men who allegedly belong to two “terrorist cells” based in Sharqia, in Egypt’s Delta, were arrested and their explosives storehouses were seized, according to a Tuesday statement by the police.

An improvised explosive device (IED) detonated Tuesday morning in Assiut, southern Egypt, according to a Ministry of Interior press office representative.

The centrist Islamist Wasat Party has dismissed reports saying its recently released leader was mediating a reconciliation between the Egyptian government and the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.

Egypt's Coptic Pope Tawadros II, the leader of the country's largest Christian denomination, is to resume his weekly sermon on Wednesday after a hiatus that lasted over a month, cathedral officials told Ahram Online.

President Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi called for uniting the fatwa bodies due the “deformation” of the image of Islam during Dar al-Iftaa’s international conference Tuesday, reported a release from the presidency.

A senior Amnesty International official has been found to have private links with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and revolutionary Islamists accused of plotting a coup in an Arab state.

In the four years since the Arab Spring, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has gone from the streets to the presidential palace and back again. Now, with its leader sentenced to death and its followers persecuted by President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi’s regime, the Muslim Brotherhood is at a critical juncture. Will it be destroyed? Will it give up on its doctrine of nonviolence? Or will it just fade away, its younger members drawn to more radical movements such as ISIS?

The chairman of the centrist Islamist Wasat Party Abul Ela Mady resumed his political activity on Saturday, a few days after his release from custody, according to sources.

Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta held a two-day international Fatwa conference to counter radical extremism entitled Fatwa: current reality and future prospects, with the participation of 50 countries, Youm7 reported Monday.

It said it was “doing everything in its power” and working with the Croatian Embassy in Cairo to obtain information about the kidnapped man. “The ministry is also keeping close contact with the victim’s family”, it said.

The lawyer of ousted Islamist president Mohamed Mursi challenged on Saturday a death sentence and a life in prison sentence handed to the former president.

Remarks by Egypt's education minister on whether school-age girls should or should not wear the hijab triggered confusion and initiated rumours that the government would ban the Islamic scarf in schools.

As Egypt prepares for parliamentary elections at the end of this year there are growing concerns that secular political parties might not be able to compete well. Not only do non-Islamist parties complain of election laws that allocate the majority of seats in the coming parliament to independents, but also internal power struggles and ideological differences could seriously compromise their performance in the coming polls.

The leader of Nigeria's Boko Haram denied he had been killed or ousted as chief of the jihadist group in an audio recording released Sunday attributed to him by security experts.

Islamic State group jihadists have beheaded 12 people and hung them on crosses during a battle for the coastal city of Sirte, the national news agency LANA reported Saturday.

The militant group Islamic State said in an audio broadcast on Thursday that its Egyptian affiliate had killed a Croatian hostage, a day after a photograph of a beheaded corpse purported to be that of the Croat was circulated by the group’s supporters.