The visit of Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry to Jerusalem on Sunday, the first such trip in nine years, was a sign of the intensifying relations between the two countries on a wide range of issues.

Mr Shoukry's meetings with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were officially focused on Egypt's offer to host direct talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in Cairo, but they also discussed other regional matters.

Mr Shoukry's visit to Israel was preceded by a trip two weeks earlier to Ramallah, where he met Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Egypt is proposing a "working group" along with Jordan in which the Israelis and Palestinians can meet and work on confidence-building measures. While the Palestinians have agreed in principle to take part in the group, it is still unclear whether they will agree to direct talks with Israel in Cairo before Israel agrees to their demands for a settlement building freeze and the release of Palestinian prisoners.

Since the 2013 military coup in Egypt, ties between Israel and the regime of President Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi have continued to improve. The two governments have worked together on fighting the Daesh affiliate in Sinai - including, reportedly, a deal to let Israeli drones strike jihadi targets - and on dealing with Hamas in Gaza.

According to the Egyptian media, during his meetings last week in Ethiopia, Mr Netanyahu interceded on Egypt's behalf with the government in Addis Ababa on the dispute between the two countries over Ethiopia's planned dam on the Nile, which could endanger Egypt's water supplies.

These issues were also believed to have come up in the talks this week in Jerusalem. Senior political sources in Jerusalem said that Israel was interested in pursuing the Egyptian path towards peace talks in order to ward off both the French initiative to hold an international conference on the Israel-Palestine conflict in Paris and a last-ditch attempt by the Obama administration to set a framework for solving the conflict.

The Netanyahu government is wary of being constrained by the international community to a fixed schedule for establishing a Palestinian state and believes that the current Egyptian regime will be more amenable.