Egyptian military engineers defused Saturday mortar rounds rigged to explode on a railroad linking the canal cities of Ismailiya and Suez, security officials said.

Police called in the military experts after residents of a village near the railroad spotted the bomb, the officials said.

An Egyptian prosecutor leveled new accusations against Mohammed Morsi, already facing trial on other charges, alleging the Islamist had insulted the country's judiciary when he was president, media reported Wednesday.

The prosecutor issued a new detention order for Morsi over his comments that judges had rigged a 2005 parliamentary election.

Gaza's Hamas prime minister on Thursday played down tensions between the Islamist movement and Egypt that have developed between the two sides followed the ouster of Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi.

At the same time, the Gaza energy authority warned that the enclave's sole power plant is in danger of shutting down within days because of a fuel shortage indirectly caused by those tensions.

Egypt's Interior Minister Mohammed Ibrahim on Thursday survived a bomb attack on his convoy, warning shortly afterwards the country faced a "wave of terrorism" amid a sweeping police crackdown on Islamists.

Security officials said a car bomb struck the minister's convoy around 10:30 am (0830 GMT) near his home in the Nasr City area, in the first such attack in Cairo in years.

A jihadist group on Wednesday poured scorn on the Egyptian military's claims of victories in the restive Sinai peninsula where the army said it launched deadly air strikes on militants.

The fiercely anti-Israeli group al-Salafiya al-Jihadiya, in a statement posted on Islamist forums, condemned "the state media and the army as liars" who "celebrate ... fake victories in the Sinai."

A delegation from the African Union, which suspended Egypt after Islamist president Mohammed Morsi's ouster, on Wednesday urged all parties in the country to back the political transition.

"We hope that all parties meet together around the roadmap" announced by the new authorities after Morsi's July 3 ouster, Alfa Omar Konari, who headed the three-member delegation that arrived in Egypt last week, told reporters.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday that Turkey's ambassador to Egypt would return to Cairo, three weeks after he was recalled over the bloody crackdown on supporters of the country's ousted Islamist president.

"Do not forget that we recalled the ambassador for consultations," Erdogan told reporters at an Ankara airport before leaving for Saint Petersburg to attend the G20 conference.

Qatari-owned news channel al-Jazeera has accused Egyptian authorities of jamming the network's satellite signals, as the broadcaster kept up its critical coverage of Cairo's crackdown on Islamists.

"Independent experts" used by al-Jazeera have determined where the jamming was coming from, the network said on its website late on Tuesday.

Egypt's interim president Adly Mansour on Tuesday vowed his government will stick to a timetable for elections next year and hoped to lift a state of emergency in mid-September.

Mansour, in his first television interview since the military appointed him on ousting president Mohammed Morsi on July 3, added that Egypt was facing "terrorism" that was hampering investment and tourism.

Several hundred Egyptians protested Tuesday in the frontier town of Rafah against the military's demolition of homes across the border from the Palestinian Gaza Strip, witnesses and security officials said.

Troops have bulldozed at least 15 homes in the restive border town which security officials said housed entrances to tunnels used to smuggle goods into Islamist-ruled Gaza.