Egypt will use its influence as chair of the U.N. Security Council in May to defend the interests of the Palestinian people, the presidency said on Monday.

An Egyptian court recommended death sentences on Saturday for six codefendants of Mohamed Morsi but not for the ousted Islamist president in their trial on espionage charges.

The presiding judge in the trial asked the mufti -- the country's official interpreter of Islamic law -- to consider death sentences for the six codefendants, saying the court would convene again on June 18 after the mufti's response.

When huge sinkholes and deep cracks began appearing across the ploughed fields and asphalt roads of the southern Gaza Strip, residents and farmers knew better than to blame natural causes.

Although no one has ever seen it, locals around Rafah city -- on Gaza's border with Egypt -- claim the culprit of this landscape destruction is a one-meter wide underground pipeline set up by Cairo to pump seawater deep into the frontier earth.

Hundreds of Egyptian journalists demanded the sacking of the interior minister in a raucous meeting at the Journalists' Syndicate on Wednesday, after an unprecedented police raid to arrest two reporters.

Police cordoned off streets leading to the syndicate headquarters in downtown Cairo but allowed members to gather in and around the building for their general assembly, where they chanted "the interior ministry are thugs".

An Egyptian court sentenced prominent activist Sanaa Seif to six months in prison on Wednesday, months after she was freed by a presidential pardon in another case.

Seif, whose older brother and dissident Alaa Abdel Fattah has also been imprisoned since February 2015, was convicted of "insulting the judiciary," a judicial official said.

Egypt's top appeals court acquitted on Wednesday Hosni Mubarak's last prime minister of corruption charges after overturning his sentence for illegal profiteering, his lawyer and a judicial official said.

Ahmed Nazif had been found guilty by two criminal courts in 2012 and 2015 of illegally amassing 64 million Egyptian pounds ($7.2 million) serving under the former president.

Sudan insisted on Monday it had "sovereign rights" over two border territories whose ownership has been the subject of a long-standing dispute between Cairo and Khartoum.

Sudan has regularly protested at Egypt's administration of Halayeb and Shalatin near the Red Sea, saying they are part of its sovereign territory since shortly after independence in 1956.

An Egyptian policeman who shot dead a vendor over the price of a cup of tea will stand trial, a prosecution official said, amid growing outrage at police abuses.

The prosecution has referred Zeinhom Abdel-Razzek to a criminal court on charges of murder and attempted murder, the official said.

A roadside bomb in the North Sinai town of El-Arish killed three Egyptian police conscripts on Wednesday, the interior ministry said.

Jihadists have waged an insurgency in the restive peninsula that has killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers since the army toppled Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013.

Britain has said it is "disappointed" at the lack of progress in the investigation into the murder of an Italian student studying at Cambridge who was found dead in Egypt in February.

Giulio Regeni, a 28-year-old doctoral student who had been researching trade unions, disappeared in Cairo on January 25.