Egyptian lawmaker attacked with shoe for dining with Israeli envoy

An Egyptian lawmaker has been attacked with a shoe in parliament after he invited the Israeli ambassador to Cairo for dinner.

Tawfik Okasha, a television presenter and lawmaker known for courting controversy, was attacked during a parliament session in the Egyptian capital on Sunday with one colleague hurling a shoe at him and others demanding that he be suspended.

Okasha hosted the Israeli ambassador Haim Koren for dinner at his home in the northeastern Dakahlia province last week. He made the invitation live on a television show.

The Israeli ambassador has confirmed that he and his staff had a three-hour dinner meeting at the Okasha's home on Wednesday evening.

"He proposed the meeting, at which he raised ideas of us helping Egypt in the areas of water, agriculture and education - to try to set up a number of schools with Israeli training," Koren said, adding, "I offered to work on putting this together, and that we meet again. I will soon be inviting him over to our place. He showed great courage. He knew he would be attacked, and nonetheless he stood firm on his convictions."

The move has sparked anger in the parliament, with several lawmakers demanding Okasha be dismissed from parliament. More than 100 Egyptian lawmakers have also signed a statement rejecting normalization of ties with Israel and demanding an investigation into Okasha's actions.

Egypt was the first of a handful of Arab countries to recognize Israel with a United States-sponsored 1979 peace accord.

Israel has an ambassador stationed in Cairo but the embassy has been the focal point of a series of protest rallies in the past. 

Protesters demanded that the Egyptian government sever all ties with Israel and an immediate halt in gas exports to Tel Aviv.  

The embassy was closed on September 9, 2011, after thousands of protesters stormed the compound in Cairo.

The wave of demonstrations was the part of a series of major protest rallies that led to the downfall of the decades-long Egyptian ruler Hosni Mubarak.  

In September, 2015, the Israeli regime's embassy in Cairo, was reopened after a four-year closure.

This came after a three-year lapse in diplomatic relations after the election in June 2012 of Mohamed Morsi, who recalled Cairo’s last ambassador to Tel Aviv in protest to the Israeli regime’s aggression against Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.

The relations between Egypt and the Israeli regime have been growing since President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi took power in the Arab country in 2014 after orchestrating a military coup against Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, a year earlier.

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