Human Rights Watch on Tuesday accused Egypt's military of having "violated international law" through mass home demolitions and evictions over the past two years along its border with Gaza.

Egypt's army in October created a wide buffer zone in the border town of Rafah in the north of the Sinai Peninsula, where it says tunnels have allowed militants and weapons in from the Palestinian enclave.

An Egypt-based affiliate of the Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for a bomb attack in the capital, Cairo, which wounded two people.

The claim was reported late Sunday by SITE Intelligence Group, a U.S.-based group that monitors militant websites.

A small bomb blast in a busy western district of the Egyptian capital wounded a policeman and a passerby on Sunday, a police official said.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the bomb went off near administrative offices of the foreign ministry.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi swore in a new government on Saturday that included 16 new ministers, a week after the previous administration resigned following a corruption scandal.

Sharif Ismail, who served as petroleum minister in the last cabinet, was sworn in as prime minister in a ceremony shown on state television.

On stretchers and in wheelchairs, six Mexican tourists hurt in a mistaken Egyptian air strike that killed eight others returned home Friday, as Mexico pressed for compensation for the victims.

President Enrique Pena Nieto visited the five women and one man at a public hospital in Mexico city hours after they returned on the presidential plane with the country's foreign minister.

A Mexican tourist who survived an air strike in Egypt recalled a harrowing three-hour bombing that killed eight compatriots, including her husband, whose dying words to her were "I love you."

Susan Calderon's dramatic account was published in the El Universal newspaper on Thursday, hours before she and five other survivors headed home on a Mexican government plane with the foreign minister.

Gunmen have shot dead a police general in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, the interior ministry said, in the latest attack claimed by Islamic State group jihadists.

Assailants in a car gunned down General Khaled Kamal Osman during an inspection of a police unit in the North Sinai provincial capital El-Arish late on Wednesday, the interior ministry said.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry on Wednesday pledged a quick and transparent investigation into the accidental killings of eight Mexican tourists by security forces.

Reading out a joint statement at a press conference with his visiting Mexican counterpart, Shoukry said Egypt had committed "to carry out a prompt, thorough and transparent investigation" into the deaths.

Mexico's foreign minister called Wednesday for an "exhaustive" and transparent investigation into an Egyptian air strike that mistakenly killed eight Mexican tourists, after she visited survivors at a Cairo hospital.

The Mexicans have said their tour group came under aerial attack on Sunday in what the Egyptian interior ministry described as a botched operation against militants in the Western Desert. Four Egyptians were also killed.

Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris, who offered to buy a Mediterranean island to help hundreds of thousands of Syrians fleeing war, said Monday he was in talks to buy two private Greek islands.

The businessman announced earlier this month he was looking to buy an island which would "host the migrants and provide jobs for them building their new country."