Egypt disputed Sunday a claim by British human rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin Clooney that she had been warned she risked arrest last year if she released a report in Cairo critical of the judiciary.

Clooney, a rights lawyer who married Hollywood star George Clooney in a lavish Venice ceremony last year, told Britain's Guardian newspaper that the warning had stopped her going ahead with a Cairo launch for the February 2014 report for the International Bar Association.

Islamist militants have abducted 20 Egyptian Christians in Libya in recent days, a source close to the government said Saturday.

The Ansar al-Sharia militia had kidnapped 13 of them Saturday in the coastal city of Sirte and the rest of them there over the past few days, the source said.  

British human rights lawyer Amal Clooney claimed in an interview published Saturday that she was threatened with arrest in Egypt after identifying flaws in the judicial system that later contributed to the convictions of three Al-Jazeera journalists.

Clooney, a rights lawyer who married Hollywood star George Clooney in a lavish Venice ceremony last year, helped compile a report for the International Bar Association in February 2014 that raised questions about the independence of judges and prosecutors in Egypt.

Militant group Hamas on Saturday condemned the fatal shooting by Egyptian border guards of what they said was a Palestinian minor on the Gaza border.

"We condemn the killing (Friday) of the child Zaki al-Houbi by Egyptian army gunfire on the borders, we consider what happened as a dangerous development and excessive use of force," the Islamist organisation said in a statement.

Egyptian soldiers firing from across the border shot dead a Palestinian man in the Gaza frontier town of Rafah on Friday, medics said, although the motive was not immediately known.

The border troops shot the 23-year-old man "in the back and the bullet settled in the heart. He died on the spot," emergency services spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra told Agence France-Presse.

Since the night police stormed into a Cairo bathhouse and dragged out a group of near-naked men, Hassan Sherif fears a widening police crackdown on homosexuals in Egypt.

The 32-year-old gay man, who lives with his boyfriend in a Cairo apartment, feels they could be among the next targets of police action that activists say has intensified under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Three Al-Jazeera journalists faced Friday the prospect of at least several more weeks in Egyptian prison, with two of them awaiting a decision on whether they can be deported, lawyers and relatives said.

Australian Peter Greste, Egyptian-Canadian Mohamed Fahmy and Egyptian Baher Mohamed were detained in December 2013 for spreading false information and accused of aiding the blacklisted Muslim Brotherhood.

Egypt's top court Thursday ordered a retrial of three Al-Jazeera reporters whose imprisonment on charges of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood triggered global outrage, but kept them in custody pending a new hearing.

Australian Peter Greste, Egyptian-Canadian Mohamed Fahmy and Egyptian Baher Mohamed of the broadcaster's English service were detained in December 2013 for spreading false information.

Egypt said Tuesday work will begin next week to double the width of a buffer zone being built along the border with the Gaza Strip to prevent militants infiltrating from the Palestinian enclave.

A 500-meter (546-yard) wide buffer zone is now being built along some 10 kilometers (six miles) of the border, with some 800 homes being demolished in the process.

The United Arab Emirates said Tuesday that it will not allow screening of Hollywood's Biblical epic "Exodus: Gods and Kings," mirroring similar bans by Egypt and Morocco.

The National Media Council, charged with vetting films for release in the UAE, said the Ridley Scott movie about Moses's escape from pharaonic Egypt contained "religious and historical mistakes."