Mortar fire has killed 11 civilians, all but one of them women and children,  in Egypt's North Sinai, where the government is battling an Islamist insurgency, police and medics said Thursday.

The mortar rounds, which hit two houses in a village southeast of the provincial capital El-Arish Wednesday night, also wounded six people, the officials said without specifying who was behind the attack.

Egyptian prosecutors pressed murder charges against 379 people on Wednesday over the deaths of policemen and civilians during the bloody dispersal of Islamist protest camps in the capital in 2013.

It was not immediately clear how many of the defendants were in custody but it was the latest in a string of controversial mass trials to be announced over the violence that followed the army's overthrow of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July that year.

Social Affairs Minister Rashid Derbas has said he was optimistic that Lebanon would receive a good share of pledges made by international donors at a conference that was held in Kuwait last week.

“We are optimistic. Lebanon's share is good,” Derbas told al-Liwaa newspaper in an interview published on Tuesday.

Security forces succeeded in thwarting an attempt to smuggle 3.5 tons of cannabis from Lebanon to Libya, the anti-drug bureau announced in a statement on Monday.

The drugs were transported from Lebanon to a ship, called Mare Ta Queen, which was docked outside of Lebanon's regional waters.

The Cairo-based top Sunni Muslim body Al-Azhar on Saturday condemned the massacre of nearly 150 people at Kenya's Garissa University by Somalia's Shebab Islamists.

Four militants from the al-Qaida-linked group killed 148 people, 142 of them students, and wounded at least 79 at Garissa university after a day-long siege on Thursday.

The head of an Egyptian human rights organization said Saturday he is being held in a central Cairo police station following a police raid on the group's online radio station.

Ahmed Samih, director of the Andalus Institute for Tolerance and Anti-Violence Studies, says police told him he is under investigation for broadcasting without a license on the web radio platform Horytna.

The Egyptian affiliate of the Islamic State group claimed responsibility Friday for deadly attacks on army checkpoints in the Sinai Peninsula that killed 15 soldiers and two civilians.

Jihadists launched simultaneous attacks Thursday on five checkpoints in the restive Sinai with assault rifles and grenade launchers, the deadliest in months against Egyptian security forces.

Jihadists in Egypt's Sinai killed 15 soldiers and two civilians in attacks on checkpoints on Thursday, security officials said, the deadliest in months despite a massive army campaign against the insurgents.

The gunmen, believed to be members of the Islamic State group's Egypt branch, simultaneously opened fire with assault rifles and grenade launchers at five checkpoints in the restive north of the peninsula, the security officials said.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said Washington's release to Egypt of F-16 jets and missiles will boost the fight against Islamist militants, according to a statement from his office.

The move, announced Tuesday, comes as Egypt plays a key role in the Arab offensive against Iranian-backed Huthi rebels in Yemen and engages in the fight against the Islamic State group in Libya.

Egypt and Nigeria accounted for an "alarming rise" in the number of death sentences handed out around the world in 2014, often on the back of security concerns, Amnesty International said Wednesday.

The London-based rights watchdog also criticised Pakistan for lifting a moratorium on the execution of civilians in the wake of the Peshawar school massacre by Taliban militants in December.