Egypt’s military launched air strikes and ground operations that killed 25 Islamist militants in North Sinai on Sunday, security sources said, as the country grapples with an increasingly ambitious insurgency based in the region.

The Supreme Administrative Court on Sunday upheld an earlier verdict in which it turned down a petition demanding the dissolution of the Salafi-led Nour Party, citing its religious background that allegedly violates the political parties law.

The ultra-conservative Salafist Nour Party has launched a campaign against extremism and terrorism. "Egypt stronger than terrorism' aims to raise public awareness of the dangers of extremist ideas and protect the youth against them," Nour Party leader Younis Makhyoun said in a statement on Sunday.

Two civilians were killed and a third was injured in a blast in North Sinai's Sheikh Zuweid on Saturday, police sources said, raising the civilian death toll on Saturday to six.

With wooden crosses around their necks and others tattooed on their arms, several dozen Iraqi Christians are training to recapture their homes overrun by the Islamic State jihadist group.

Minya University President Gamal Eddin Abul Magd said that the university had sent a letter to Mohamed Saad al-Katatny, a leading figure of the Muslim Brotherhood, to inform him that his contract had been terminated.

Publishing news on the prosecution’s investigations into the Monday assassination of late Attorney-General Hisham Barakat has been banned, state-owned MENA reported.

Egypt launched air strikes on Islamist militant targets in the Sinai peninsula on Thursday, killing 23 fighters a day after the deadliest clashes in the region in years, security sources said.

Nine Muslim Brotherhood leaders were killed by police on Wednesday, with conflicting reports on the conditions of their death.

The Sinai-based militant group Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis claimed responsibility for a string of attacks which targeted security checkpoints and facilities in North Sinai early Wednesday.

As reports of deaths from around the North Sinai town of Sheikh Zuweid continue to mount, it seems that Wednesday’s events represent the largest-scale terrorist attack that the Egyptian army has ever confronted in the peninsula.

Exactly three years ago, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi was sworn in as Egypt’s first democratically elected civilian president before the land’s Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC).

Coptic Bishop Rafael has spoken again on the issue of homosexuality after suggesting gay people “need treatment”, saying that his comments were misunderstood.

A Syrian Kurdish militia said on Wednesday it had recovered full control of the border town of Tel Abyad after defeating Islamic State fighters who had raided it the day before.

Security forces arrested 20 alleged members of the Muslim Brotherhood accused in several violence-related and incitement of violence cases across the country on Monday, the Ministry of Interior announced on its official Facebook page on Tuesday.

The hardline Islamic State group has beheaded two women in Syria, the first time it has decapitated female civilians, the founder of a group monitoring the war said on Tuesday.

A suspect belonging to Giza Popular Resistance, a little-known group which had claimed responsibility for the assassination of Prosecutor General Hesham Barakat on Monday was arrested on Tuesday, Egypt’s state-run agency MENA reported, quoting sources from the Giza Security Directorate.

Iraqi officials say a series of attacks in Baghdad and in two towns near the capital has killed at least eight people.

The banned Muslim Brotherhood said on Monday it rejected killing, adding that justice must ensue for violence to end, hours after Egypt's top prosecutor was assassinated on his way to work in Cairo.

Islamic State-affiliated jihadists Sinai Province, previously known as Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis, have released a video showing their attack on a microbus in North Sinai's Al-Arish, which killed three judges and the driver on 16 May.

Islamic State affiliates in North Sinai, known as “State of Sinai”, posted a new video Sunday evening of the assassination of three judges in May. The new video went viral through social media networks under the name of “extermination of Judges”.