Today's meetings for each individual country .. Egypt: Ethiopia has no right to start filling the dam without agreement

An Egyptian official said that Ethiopia has no right to start filling the Renaissance Dam without a binding agreement, while meetings for each country are expected to be held today, on the ninth day of negotiations between Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia.

A spokesman for the Egyptian Ministry of Irrigation, Mohamed El Sebaei, said that the fifth item in the agreement of principles expressly states that it is not possible to mobilize except by agreement between the three countries.

For his part, a Sudanese source involved in the negotiations said that the differences in the Legal Committee are still running in their place, accusing Ethiopia of intransigence, and Egypt of preference for resolving differences in the corridors of the UN Security Council, where Cairo believes it has more influence there.

The Sudanese capital, Khartoum, is embracing the Renaissance Dam negotiations between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan, sponsored by the African Union and the participation of international observers, without achieving any consensus so far.

An eighth day of negotiations ended yesterday without reaching consensus on the contentious points, while Cairo rejected a proposal from Addis Ababa to postpone the settlement of the differences until after the signing of the agreement.

Today, meetings are held for each country separately, and tomorrow, Sunday, is a meeting at the ministerial level.

The Ethiopian side proposed - according to a statement from the Egyptian Ministry of Water Resources issued yesterday - to postpone the settlement of the contentious points in the current negotiation process, and refer them to a technical committee that will be formed under the agreement, to follow up on the implementation of the terms of the agreement, which Egypt rejected "in form and object."

The statement attributed the reason for Egypt's refusal to postpone that it is not possible to refer the points of contention that affect the Egyptian concerns, in major technical issues representing the technical nerve of the agreement, to the technical committee to decide later after signing the agreement.

It is noteworthy that, under the auspices of the African Union, the tripartite meetings between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan were resumed last Friday, via video technology, to discuss reaching an agreement on filling and operating the dam.

Ethiopia is adhering to the filling and operation of the dam in July, while Egypt and Sudan refuse to add Addis Ababa to this step before reaching an agreement.