At least four Palestinian passengers have been reportedly kidnapped in Egypt’s restive northern Sinai region.
According to the Palestinian resistance movement, Hamas, unidentified gunmen took the four Palestinians from a bus on Wednesday late at night local time.
Hamas officials in the besieged Gaza Strip announced the bus was heading from the Egyptian capital, Cairo, to the main Rafah border crossing, located north of the country, into Gaza.
Palestinian authorities said they contacted the Egyptian government for further details and urged Cairo to secure their release.
The Egyptian army has been fighting militants in the troubled region since the ouster of former president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013.
Morsi was toppled in a military coup led by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the current president and the then head of the armed forces. Sisi has resorted to a heavy-handed crackdown on Morsi's supporters.
Back in 2013, Mohammed Morsi was charged by a court in Egypt almost immediately after his ouster and the arrest of links with Hamas and plotting attacks on jails in the 2011 uprising that ousted former ruler Hosni Mubarak.
