The brother of al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri joined dozens of Egyptian Islamists in a protest Friday near the French embassy in Cairo against French intervention in Mali.

Mohammed al-Zawahiri took part in the demonstration during which protesters accused Paris of being "at war against Islam".

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah and the rival Hamas agreed on Thursday to revive their long-stalled reconciliation accord by the end of this month, the head of Fatah's delegation to talks in Cairo told AFP.

"Fatah and Hamas agreed at a meeting in Cairo on Thursday between delegations of the two movements on a timetable for implementing Palestinian reconciliation," Azzam al-Ahmad said by telephone from the Egyptian capital.

Egypt's prosecution on Wednesday accepted an offer by ousted president Hosni Mubarak and his family to pay back gifts from the country's flagship newspaper worth millions of Egyptian pounds.

Mubarak, his wife Suzanne, his two sons Alaa and Gamal and their wives allegedly accepted gifts from al-Ahram worth 18 million Egyptian pounds (around $2.7 million) between 2006 and 2011.

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi said on Wednesday that comments on Israel attributed to him before he was elected, slammed as deeply offensive by the United States, were taken out of context.

"The president stressed they were taken from comments on the Israeli aggression against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and stressed the need to put the remarks in the right context," said a statement from the presidency issued after Morsi met U.S. Senator John McCain.

At least 25 people were killed on Wednesday when a 12-story building collapsed in the Egyptian coastal city of Alexandria, the health ministry said.

Another 12 people were injured, deputy health minister Mohammed al-Sharkawi told AFP.

The United States on Tuesday condemned vitriolic anti-Semitic remarks attributed to Egypt's Islamist President Mohamed Morsi before he was elected to office, and urged him to make clear his views.

"The language that we've seen is deeply offensive," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said, adding "we think that these comments should be repudiated, and they should be repudiated firmly."

Egyptian police fired tear gas to disperse protesters in the main railway station in second city Alexandria on Tuesday, hours after 19 people were killed when a train carrying conscripts derailed.

A police official said hundreds of protesters clashed with passengers in the station when they tried to block trains from leaving, and police fired tear gas to disperse them.

A Saudi court on Tuesday sentenced an Egyptian rights lawyer whose arrest on drug trafficking charges in April sparked a diplomatic row with Cairo to five years in prison and 300 lashes.

Ahmed al-Gizawi, arrested in April, was accused of trying to smuggle 21,380 capsules of the anti-anxiety drug Xanax, which is banned in Saudi Arabia where drug trafficking carries the death sentence.

Egypt's top court was on Tuesday to rule whether Egypt's Islamist-dominated Senate should be dissolved as well as on the validity of a panel that wrote the country's controversial constitution.

In advance of the landmark rulings, dozens staged a sit-in overnight outside the Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC) on the banks of the Nile in Cairo, as riot police formed a cordon around the building.

At least 19 people died and more than 107 were injured when two railroad passenger cars derailed just south of Cairo after midnight Monday, the health ministry said.

The accident comes less than two weeks after a new transportation minister was appointed to overhaul the rail system, and just two months after a deadly collision between a train and school bus.