The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Cooperation and Egyptian Expatriates announced on Monday, 26 October 2026, that it is following the circumstances of the detention of the Egyptian fishing boat “Mohamed Abu El-Azayem” in the Saudi region of Tabuk on the Red Sea, with nine Egyptian sailors on board, after it entered Saudi territorial waters “by mistake” on 16 October.<\/p>\n
The ministry said in its statement<\/a> that the Egyptian Consulate General in Jeddah held intensive contacts with senior officials at the relevant Saudi authorities, including the coast guard and port authorities, to speed up the procedures for the return of the boat and its crew to Egypt, and that the consulate sent a delegate to visit the nine sailors to check on their condition. It added that contacts with the Saudi side are continuing to secure the sailors’ return “as soon as possible.”<\/p>\n The ministry called on fishermen and workers on Egyptian fishing boats to abide by the rules regulating navigation and sea fishing, and not to cross into the territorial waters of neighbouring countries without obtaining the necessary permits<\/a>, to avoid legal accountability.<\/p>\n The statement was issued on the same day that the House of Representatives approved<\/a> a mandate for President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi to take the necessary measures to support Saudi Arabia in defending itself should Riyadh request it.<\/p>\n Photo: Wex Major 98 via Wikimedia Commons<\/a> (CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Egypt is following the detention of the boat “Mohamed Abu El-Azayem” and its nine sailors in Tabuk after it entered Saudi waters by mistake on 16 October.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":24823,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20481],"tags":[21134,21135,21125,1447,5004,21133],"kateb":[710],"class_list":["post-24827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-brief","tag-egyptian-fishermen","tag-fishing-boat","tag-foreign-ministry","tag-red-sea","tag-saudi-arabia","tag-tabuk","kateb-zawia3-com"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/tabuk-boat-en.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24827"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24829,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24827\/revisions\/24829"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24827"},{"taxonomy":"kateb","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/kateb?post=24827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![Wikimedia Commons<\/a> (](\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Fishing_boat_at_the_Red_Sea.jpg\"){kind=link}