CAIRO: The floating library MV Logos Hope — the world’s largest ocean-going book fair —  will dock in the Port Said tourist port this week on only its second visit to Egypt in more than 12 years.

The ship will open its floating exhibition to thousands of daily visitors in what the Suez Canal Economic Zone media office described as a major cultural event.

More than 350 passengers on board will also disembark to make tourist visits to Cairo.

CAIRO: Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi on Sunday urged Israel’s new hard-line government to refrain from “any measures” that could inflame regional tensions, in a phone call congratulating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his return to office.
The leaders spoke days after Netanyahu’s new Cabinet was sworn in, promising in its coalition guidelines to make settlement construction in the occupied West Bank a top priority.

RAMALLAH: Most Palestinians will remember 2022 as a painful year in terms of the scale of human loss, the increase in Israeli aggression, and the election of an extreme right-wing Israeli government that will further deny them their rights.

Ibrahim Melhem, spokesman for the Palestinian government, told Arab News that 2022 was “the worst year in terms of the high number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli army.”

According to official figures, 225 people were killed in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip over the past 12 months.

BEIRUT: At least 3,825 people have died in Syria’s war in 2022, the lowest yearly toll since the start of the conflict more than a decade ago, a war monitor said on Saturday.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights had put the death toll at 3,746 throughout 2021, before revising it up to 3,882.
After years of deadly battle and bombardments following the brutal suppression of 2011 anti-regime protests, the conflict has largely abated in the last three years.

CAIRO: The Daesh group said Saturday that it carried out a deadly attack on an Egyptian police checkpoint in the Suez Canal city of Ismailia the previous day.
“A cell of soldiers of the caliphate managed to attack an Egyptian police roadblock… with a machine gun,” the jihadist group’s Amaq news agency said.
Three Egyptian policemen were killed in the attack, the first of its kind in nearly three years in mainland Egypt, which has largely been spared the deadly insurgency in the nearby Sinai peninsula.

On Saturday, Saudi Arabia condemned the attack.