CAIRO — A spokesman for Egypt’s president said Wednesday there was currently no need to amend the peace treaty with Israel, despite calls in Cairo to amend the 1979 accord to allow the country to beef up its presence in the Sinai Peninsula to combat militants there.



The comments by Yasser Ali, carried by the state Middle East News Agency, were made in New York where President Mohamed Morsi is attending the UN General Assembly.



Many Egyptians have for years considered the limitations on troop deployments to be impinging on national sovereignty.



Egyptian political groups including the Muslim Brotherhood, from which Morsi hails, have called for revising the treaty.



Although Israel has allowed Egypt to temporarily strengthen its forces in the Sinai to fight militants, it is wary of formalizing any changes. The treaty restored Sinai, which Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war, to Egyptian control. Areas near the border were demilitarized, however. The country’s hard-line Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Sunday there was “no chance” Israel would reevaluate the terms of the peace deal.



Since coming to power in June, Morsi has maintained that he would respect and honor all international treaties agreed to by his predecessors.



Last week, a Morsi adviser announced that he will submit a proposal for amending the 1979 Egypt-Israel treaty in the coming days.



Mohammed Esmat Seif Al-Dawla said the proposal would include major changes to the peace treaty’s fourth article, which governs the establishment of “limited force zones in Egyptian and Israeli territory” along the shared border with the Sinai Peninsula.



“With all due respect to all political and intellectual luminaries on the presidential advisory panel, only the president and his spokesman speak for the presidency,” Ali said, according to the state news agency MENA. — Agencies