Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi on Sunday hailed the peace agreement between Egypt and Israel as “stable and permanent.”
“When Sadat raised his idea of peace, no one thought that this idea would be acceptable to the general opinion,” the Egyptian president said at the World Youth forum in Sharm el-Sheikh in the Sinai Peninsula, referring to former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat who signed the peace treaty in 1979 with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
Sisi also said that most Egyptians supported the peace treaty.
Although Egypt became the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, their ties have been formally cold at times, and Egypt's political elite has remained hostile to any normalization of ties with Israel.
Ties appear to have improved under Sisi, who took power in 2013 after the army ousted Islamist President Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Two years ago, Egypt expressed a desire to play a key role in Israeli-Palestinian Authority (PA) peace talks.
Sisi has in the past urged Israelis and Palestinian Arabs to seize what he said was a "real opportunity" for peace and hailed his own country's peace deal with Israel. He repeated his call for a resumption of peace talks between Israel and the PA in September.
