Egypt opened its Rafah border crossing to Gaza on Thursday to receive wounded Palestinians as Israel pounded the enclave with air strikes, an official at the border said.

Hospitals in north Sinai, which borders Gaza and Israel, have been placed on standby to receive the Palestinians, Egypt's official MENA news agency reported.

An Egyptian soldier was killed Wednesday when a roadside bomb targeted an armored vehicle in the restive Sinai Peninsula, medical and security officials said.

Four soldiers were also wounded in the attack near the north Sinai capital of El-Arish, the officials said.

Egypt on Wednesday urged Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas in Gaza to halt their escalating conflict but played down hopes of a Cairo-mediated truce.

Egypt, which has a 1979 peace treaty with Israel, played a key role in mediating ceasefires in past wars between Hamas and the Jewish state.

Thousands of Syrian refugee women are caught in a "spiral of hardship, isolation and anxiety," widowed or separated from their husbands and struggling to survive, the U.N. warned on Tuesday.

In a new report, the U.N. agency for refugees UNHCR highlighted the plight of some 145,000 Syrian refugee women who are fending for themselves and their families in dire circumstances across the Middle East.

Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi warned the independence of Iraq's Kurdish region would be "catastrophic" and cause the Middle East to splinter along ethnic and religious lines, newspapers reported Monday.

A Sunni militant offensive that drove soldiers out of northern Iraq last month has emboldened leaders of the country's three-province Kurdish region to push for an independence referendum.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's stated regret over the trial that imprisoned Al-Jazeera journalists was a strong signal to a judiciary whose harsh rulings have prompted international outrage, analysts said.

Sisi, who had previously said it would be inappropriate to remark on court rulings, conceded on Sunday that the lengthy prison sentences in June for the three reporters, including Australian Peter Greste, had had a "negative effect".

Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Sunday defended a government decision to raise fuel prices as the authorities also slapped higher taxes on cigarettes and alcohol, state media reported.

Late Friday, the authorities decided to slash state subsidies on petrol and diesel, sparking anger among taxi drivers.

Sunni Muslim religious scholar Yusef al-Qaradawi said on Saturday that the declaration of an Islamic caliphate by jihadists fighting the governments in Syria and Iraq violates sharia law.

Last Sunday, the jihadists declared an "Islamic caliphate" in areas they control in Iraq and Syria and ordered Muslims worldwide to pledge allegiance to their leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Egypt has drastically raised fuel prices overnight to tackle a bloated subsidy system, in a potentially unpopular move that might blow back on newly elected President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

With the economy battered by three years of unrest, successive governments have said the subsidies that allowed Egyptians to buy gasoline at some of the world's cheapest prices must be lifted.

Four suspected Egyptian Islamists were killed south of Cairo early Friday while preparing explosives on a farm owned by a senior member of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, police said.

The blast in a village in the rural Fayoum province came hours after nine people were wounded when a small bomb went off in a train in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria.