Saudi Arabia and Egypt are considering holding "large-scale" military maneuvers after launching air strikes on Yemeni rebels who have been slapped with a U.N. arms embargo and sanctions.

In a possible sign the Saudi-led air campaign against the Shiite rebels may expand into a ground operation, Cairo said it and Riyadh were mulling the exercises in Saudi Arabia, with other Gulf countries participating.

An Egyptian appeals court on Tuesday upheld a seven-year prison sentence for a former Islamist presidential hopeful convicted of lying in nomination papers, a judicial source said.

Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, a firebrand fundamentalist leader, had a devoted following in the run-up to the 2012 elections before his disqualification.

Separate militant attacks in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula killed one soldier and wounded another Monday, a day after jihadists loyal to the Islamic State group killed 14 people in twin bombings.

Security officials said gunmen shot dead a soldier at a checkpoint in the Rafah area on the border with the Islamist-run Gaza Strip Palestinian enclave.

Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Sunday issued a decree making the digging or use of illegal tunnels in border areas punishable by life in jail.

The army has intensified efforts to destroy such underground tunnels connecting the restive Sinai Peninsula to the Palestinian Gaza Strip, since the ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013.

A suicide car bomb targeting a police station in Egypt's restive Sinai Peninsula on Sunday killed six people, including a police officer, and wounded at least 44 others, police and medics said.

The bombing came hours after a roadside blast hit an army vehicle killing six soldiers and wounding two in the peninsula, where security forces are battling an Islamist insurgency.

Six Egyptian soldiers were killed and two wounded in a bomb attack on their armored vehicle in the Sinai Peninsula on Sunday, the army said.

A militant group which has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State jihadist group in Iraq and Syria said it carried out the attack.

A Cairo court on Saturday confirmed death sentences for Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie and 13 others over Islamist protest violence, while the jailing of a US-Egyptian citizen for life was slammed by the White House.

Two of the 14 defendants sentenced to death have fled the country and will immediately face a retrial if apprehended.

Egyptian jihadists who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group have posted a video online appearing to show them shooting dead an Egyptian soldier and beheading another captive.

The video, uploaded overnight on social networks, shows an individual telling the camera that he is an Egyptian soldier who was captured in an ambush on an army outpost in North Sinai on April 2.

Egypt's coastguard on Friday detained a migrant boat heading for Italy, retrieved two bodies from the sea and rescued five injured people, security sources and medics said.

Coastguard officers also detained for questioning 129 migrants who were aboard the boat in the Mediterranean off the coast of the northern province of Kafr el-Sheikh, the sources said.

The Customs' anti-narcotics unit seized overnight a vegetable truck loaded with drugs, As Safir newspaper reported on Friday.

Finance Minister Ali Hassan Khalil revealed to the newspaper that the truck was coming from the Bekaa and the drugs were going to be smuggled to Egypt.