The director of Egypt’s intelligence agency has recently met with opposition politicians to discuss the selection of candidates to compete with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in the elections scheduled for next year, Arabi21 reported on Friday.

In a striking example, researchers from the Citizen Lab discovered that Egyptian operators were “simultaneously” using Pegasus and Predator spyware to hack the phone of opposition politician Ayman Nour.

Six senior Egyptian intelligence officers resigned yesterday after they were said to have warned the country’s President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi of prevailing anger among citizens across the country.

“Mr. Karam, please stay away from the union for the next four years. This is not your time; the state is going through difficult circumstances. Choose someone else to run,” a National Security Agency officer instructed Karam Abdel Halim, who relayed the conversation to Mada Masr.

Tensions have once again escalated between Hamas and Israel over the past two weeks. Israel’s raids in occupied East Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque compound sparked the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel, and Israel hit the besieged Gaza Strip with air raids, raising fears of a new war.

Egypt’s General Intelligence Service (GIS) is to be granted a sanctioned space in the national economy after lawmakers on Tuesday unanimously approved legislation that was read out to them in session.

The Egyptian Ministry of Interior on Tuesday decided to consider the headquarters of the General Intelligence Service in the New Administrative Capital as one of the places legally authorised to detain suspects in intelligence cases.

The Israeli government denied allegations that Mahmoud al-Sisi, son of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, visited Tel Aviv.

An Italian judge has asked the country’s government to intervene in the trial of four Egyptian security officers accused in the kidnapping and murder of PhD student Giulio Regeni in 2016, the Italian ANSA news agency reported.

Authorities in the United States have arrested an Egyptian-American man from New York on allegations that he unlawfully worked at the behest of the Egyptian government to track the “political opponents” of the country’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.