Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi denied on Monday Israeli media reports that he agreed to offer parts of Egyptian lands to Palestinians, reported state-run news agency MENA. Israel’s Army Radio reported on Monday that during his meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Sunday, Sisi offered expanding the Gaza Strip to five times its current size by granting Palestinians 1600 square kilometers in Sinai. “Nobody can afford to do that,” Sisi reportedly said during an event celebrating Teachers’ Day. Abbas’s aide Tayeb Abdel-Rahim also denied the news to the Palestinian news agency Ma’an on Monday. “The Egyptian and Palestinian leaderships have one position [regarding this matter]: forming a Palestinian state on the occupied lands based on the 1967 borders and with Jerusalem as the capital,” Ma’an quoted Abdel Rahim as saying. “We hope media outlets would be alert to such fabricated news broadcast by the Israeli side to distort the national position of Palestine and that of Egypt.” The new territory, which Israeli Army Radio alleged was proposed by Sisi, would be a demilitarised state under the Palestinian Authority’s autonomous rule, alongside the West Bank. The territory would be…
