Over the course of the past year, there have been more and more indications of the warming of diplomatic relations between Egypt and Israel: an official public visit by Dore Gold, the director-general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, who came to Cairo to re-inaugurate the Israeli embassy in the country; the release of Odeh Tarabin, an Israeli Arab who was convicted of spying for Israel and was in Egyptian prison for over 15 years; the appointment of a new Egyptian Ambassador to Israel after a three year absence, and even a public meeting between the Egyptian ambassador and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this week.

Although the Egyptians have been busy over the past few years with internal issues, principally dealing with the security and economic situation, their relations with Israel have been in the headlines as of late.

The peak came when Egyptian MP and journalist provocateur Tawfiq Okasha publicly met with Israeli Ambassador to Cairo Haim Koren. This elicited anger within the Egyptian parliament, which suspended him for ten sessions, and where he had a shoe thrown at him earlier this week

The Okasha affair is just another layer in a series of events which mark this trend. A lot has already been written about the security cooperation between the two countries due to the threat posed by ISIS in Sinai, as well as the fact the Egyptian Air Force crosses into Israeli airspace in order to better fight jihadists in the peninsula.

What might be defined in Israel as warming relations, others would view as Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and his close circle sending out feelers, in light of the understanding that present developments in the region make it impossible to keep the status quo – whereby the relations between the two countries were limited to dialogue between Egyptian military officers and high ranking Israeli security personnel.

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