CAIRO

The Egyptian government said that nearly a thousand Egyptians fleeing next-door Libya arrived in Cairo International Airport on Friday, raising the number of Egyptians who returned to Libya this week to over 26,000.

Egyptian Civil Aviation Ministry said on Friday that 959 Egyptians who had boarded four Egypt-bound flights from Tunisia arrived earlier in the day in Cairo airport.

Earlier on Friday, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement that 25,529 Egyptian nationals returned from Libya earlier this week.

It said that 21,407 Egyptians had crossed into Egypt through the northwestern Salloum border crossing while 4122 had flown in.

Numerous Egyptian expatriates had fled crisis-hit Libya this month after Egypt launched a series of airstrikes against suspected Daesh sites in Libya's eastern city of Darnah.

Daesh is the Arabic acronym for the "Islamic State of Iraq and Levant" militant group, which last year overran vast swathes of territory in both Iraq and Syria and won the allegiance of several militant groups across the Middle East.

Egypt's airstrikes came one day after a video appeared online purportedly showing the execution of 21 Egyptian nationals by masked Daesh militants in Libya.

Last month, the Egyptian government – citing the country's precarious security situation – advised its citizens against travelling to Libya.

Fractious Libya has remained a source of concern for neighboring Egypt since it descended into violence and chaos following the ouster and death of strongman Muammar Gaddafi in late 2011.

Head of Egypt's official statistics agency Abu Bakr Abdel-Karim had told The Anadolu Agency earlier that there were no specific figures on the number of Egyptians living in Libya.