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Sisi Underscores to Abbas Importance of Maintaining Calm, Especially in Gaza

Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and his Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, during a meeting in Cairo on Tuesday, September 6, 2022. (Palestine’s embassy in Cairo)
Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and his Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, during a meeting in Cairo on Tuesday, September 6, 2022. (Palestine’s embassy in Cairo)
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Sisi Underscores to Abbas Importance of Maintaining Calm, Especially in Gaza

Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and his Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, during a meeting in Cairo on Tuesday, September 6, 2022. (Palestine’s embassy in Cairo)
Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and his Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, during a meeting in Cairo on Tuesday, September 6, 2022. (Palestine’s embassy in Cairo)

Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi held talks with his Palestinian counterpart Mahmoud Abbas at al-Ittihadia Palace in Cairo on Tuesday.

Discussions touched on the developments of the Palestinian cause and providing support to the Palestinian people.

Presidential spokesman Bassam Rady said Sisi underlined the importance of joining efforts to support the Palestinian stance and maintain calm, especially in the Gaza Strip.

He affirmed his country’s unwavering support to the Palestinian cause to ensure realizing the Palestinian people’s legitimate aspirations based on the two-state solution and the establishment of the Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital on the June 1967 borders.

Abbas, for his part, expressed appreciation for Egypt's tireless efforts in support of the Palestinian cause and hailed Cairo’s historical role, as well as its firm position to reach a just and comprehensive solution in this regard.

Abbas also underscored the deep and special Egyptian-Palestinian ties and keenness to continue consultation and coordination with Sisi on the overall situation in his country.

Egypt’s Chief of General Intelligence Major General Abbas Kamel, Palestinian Minister of Foreign Affairs Riyad al-Maliki, Secretary-General of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization Hussein al-Sheikh, Head of the Palestinian General Intelligence Major General Majed Faraj, and the Palestinian Ambassador to Egypt Diab al-Louh attended the meeting.

According to the Egyptian presidency, both leaders agreed to continue consultation and coordination at the bilateral level and within the trilateral Egyptian-Jordanian-Palestinian coordination framework and other frameworks to follow-up on future steps and efforts to support the Palestinian cause.

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Israel’s Military Admits to Shooting at Ambulances in Gaza

Palestinians buy clothes in a shop next to a destroyed apartment building in preparation for Eid al-Fitr celebrations at Al-Rimal neighborhood in the center of Gaza City Friday March 28, 2025.(AP)
Palestinians buy clothes in a shop next to a destroyed apartment building in preparation for Eid al-Fitr celebrations at Al-Rimal neighborhood in the center of Gaza City Friday March 28, 2025.(AP)
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Israel’s Military Admits to Shooting at Ambulances in Gaza

Palestinians buy clothes in a shop next to a destroyed apartment building in preparation for Eid al-Fitr celebrations at Al-Rimal neighborhood in the center of Gaza City Friday March 28, 2025.(AP)
Palestinians buy clothes in a shop next to a destroyed apartment building in preparation for Eid al-Fitr celebrations at Al-Rimal neighborhood in the center of Gaza City Friday March 28, 2025.(AP)

Israel’s military admitted Saturday it had fired on ambulances in the Gaza Strip after identifying them as “suspicious vehicles,” with Hamas condemning it as a “war crime” that killed at least one person.

The incident took place last Sunday in the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood in the southern city of Rafah, close to the Egyptian border.

Israeli troops launched an offensive there on March 20, two days after the army resumed aerial bombardments of Gaza following an almost two-month-long truce.

Israeli troops had “opened fire toward Hamas vehicles and eliminated several Hamas terrorists,” the military said in a statement to AFP.

“A few minutes afterward, additional vehicles advanced suspiciously toward the troops... The troops responded by firing toward the suspicious vehicles, eliminating a number of Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists.”

The military did not say if there was fire coming from the vehicles.

It added that “after an initial inquiry, it was determined that some of the suspicious vehicles... were ambulances and fire trucks,” and condemned “the repeated use” by “terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip of ambulances for terrorist purposes.”

The day after the incident, Gaza’s Civil Defense agency said in a statement that it had not heard from a team of six rescuers from Tal al-Sultan who had been urgently dispatched to respond to deaths and injuries.

On Friday, it reported finding the body of the team leader and the rescue vehicles—an ambulance and a firefighting vehicle—and said a vehicle from the Palestine Red Crescent Society was also “reduced to a pile of scrap metal.”

Basem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, accused Israel of carrying out “a deliberate and brutal massacre against Civil Defense and Palestinian Red Crescent teams in the city of Rafah.”

“The targeted killing of rescue workers—who are protected under international humanitarian law—constitutes a flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions and a war crime,” he said.

Tom Fletcher, head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said that since March 18, “Israeli airstrikes in densely populated areas have killed hundreds of children and other civilians.”

“Patients killed in their hospital beds. Ambulances shot at. First responders killed,” he said in a statement.

“If the basic principles of humanitarian law still count, the international community must act while it can to uphold them.”