The Biden administration has allowed much of US foreign military aid to Egypt to go ahead, saying the country was vital for US national security interests, despite what critics have said about widespread human rights abuses, Reuters reports.

The United States plans to withhold $85m in military aid to Egypt owing to Cairo’s failure to uphold US conditions on freeing political prisoners and other human rights issues, a US senator said, with some of the withheld funds being redirected to Taiwan.

Rights groups called on Monday for accountability over the deaths of hundreds of people killed in a single day, 10 years ago, when Egyptian security forces dispersed a protest against the ouster of the country’s first democratically elected President, Reuters reports.

A group of Democratic U.S. House of Representatives members urged President Joe Biden’s administration on Thursday to withhold some military aid to Egypt over human rights concerns.

The head of Egypt’s state-backed National Council for Human Rights (NCHR) has sparked criticism online after comparing a prison complex to luxury accommodation.

A group of 11 US senators has called on the United States to withhold a larger portion of military aid to Egypt, saying the North African country’s human rights record “has continued to deteriorate” over the past year under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

The late Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi used to remind us that, unlike individuals who may have more than one life-defining opportunity in a lifetime, such opportunities come to nations only once in a generation, if that.

The situation Palestinian refugees face in Egypt is unique. In addition to being fewer in number than the large Palestinian communities that settled in pre-1948 Palestine’s other neighbouring countries (Syria, Jordan and Lebanon) they live in limbo; neither recognised as refugees nor as citizens.

The Egyptian authorities have imposed an arbitrary travel ban on former prisoner of conscience Ahmed Samir Santawy, human rights group Amnesty International said in a statement on Saturday.

Egyptian authorities have arbitrarily detained women and girls related to suspected members of the Islamic State (ISIS) affiliate in North Sinai, some for months or years, Human Rights Watch and the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights said today.