Ten people including women and children were killed in Egypt's restive Sinai Peninsula on Tuesday when a rocket struck their home, security and medical official said.

It was not immediately clear whether it was a missile fired by one of the Egyptian army helicopters that have repeatedly struck militants, or an errant mortar round from the insurgents, security officials said.

Indifferent to the sniper fire and shelling around him, the owner of the oldest hotel in Syria's Aleppo sits gloomily in the storied property he has been forced to close.

Just a few metres from the front line separating government and rebel forces in the city, Armen Mazloumian smokes a cigarette on the terrace of the Baron Hotel.

With soldiers firing warning shots to herald the nightly curfew and jihadist militants beheading informants, Sinai's residents find themselves caught in the middle of Egypt's "war on terror".

The Sinai Peninsula has become a hotbed of Islamist militancy after decades of neglect under former president Hosni Mubarak, and amid a security vacuum triggered by the army's ouster last year of his successor Mohamed Morsi.

An Egyptian woman has died of bird flu in the southern province of Assiut, a health official said Monday, the second death from the H5N1 virus in Egypt this year.

The 22-year-old woman died on Sunday after she was diagnosed with the disease on November 10, said Ahmed Abdel Hamid, a health ministry official in Assiut, 385 kilometers (230 miles) south of Cairo.

An Egyptian court referred five university students Monday to military trial over a violent protest, judicial sources said, under a controversial new law expanding the army's powers to try civilians.

The students from Cairo's Islamic Al-Azhar University were sent for trial after a protest in January during which part of a campus building was torched.

Abu Mahmoud was given just eight hours to leave his home on the Egyptian side of the divided Gaza border town of Rafah before authorities began demolishing it to create a buffer zone.

Not only are he and others displaced like him angry, they also say they are often abused and branded traitors and "terrorists" because they come from the lawless frontier in north Sinai.

Egypt's deadliest militant group, which has pledged allegiance to Islamic State jihadists, on Friday claimed responsibility for a suicide attack last month that killed 30 soldiers.

Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, which has spearheaded an insurgency in Egypt's restive Sinai Peninsula, made the claim in a video posted on social media.

Rights group Amnesty International urged Egypt Friday to release dozens of mostly Palestinian refugees who have fled the Syrian conflict, saying they were being held illegally and threatened with extradition.

Since the army removed Islamist president Mohammed Morsi last year, Syrian and Palestinian refugees in Egypt suspected of supporting him have been targeted by the authorities and the media.

Two car bombs struck near the shuttered Egyptian and United Arab Emirates embassies in Libya's militia-controlled capital within minutes of each other Thursday, an AFP correspondent and a UAE official said.

Two guards posted outside the empty Egyptian embassy compound were wounded in the first blast, Libya's LANA news agency reported.

Militants shot dead five Egyptian conscripts in the Sinai Peninsula on Thursday, as the army searched for eight servicemen missing after an attack on a navy boat in the Mediterranean.

The military carried out air strikes in Sinai, killing three members of the Islamist militant group Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, security officials said.