In Egypt, an appeals court on Saturday cancelled a ruling to list the Palestinian group Hamas as a terrorist organization. Cairo has for many years played a central role in engineering ceasefires between neighbouring Israel and Hamas, including a truce reached between the sides in August that ended a 50-day Gaza war. Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, was classified as a terrorist organisation by Egypt in January. Hamas has rejected the courts’ decisions, while the Brotherhood maintains it is committed to peaceful activism and rejects links to violence
Hamas is an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood which the authorities have declared a terrorist group and have repressed since the army ousted one of its leaders, Mohamed Mursi, from the presidency in 2013.
The February ruling came after a lawyer petitioned the court to classify Hamas as a terrorist organisation, accusing it of using underground tunnels to smuggle weapons into Egypt.
But in March the government appealed against the ruling, which took ties between Hamas and Egyptian authorities to a new low. The Islamist movement had strongly condemned the February verdict – which came a month after another court ruled Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, a “terrorist group”.
