At least eight police officers died and 10 were injured in an attack on a checkpoint in Egypt's restive North Sinai province early on Monday, a security source was cited as telling state-run daily Al-Ahram.
The interior ministry has yet to issue a statement that includes details of the attack, for which no group immediately claimed responsibility.
However, a North Sinai based journalist was quoted as telling Daily News Egypt's website that militants staged the attack in a suburb south of the flashpoint city of Al-Arish using a stolen garbage truck with a bomb inside it.
The militants also fired missiles and rocket-propelled grenades at police guarding the checkpoint, Daily News Egypt quoted the unnamed journalist as saying.
The attack came just days after the Egyptian army said it had foiled a plot by militants to attack several North Sinai checkpoints on Friday. The army killed nine militants and injured 16 others last week, Al-Ahram cited an army spokesman as saying.
The Egyptian army and police have been battling an entrenched Islamist insurgency for several years in North Sinai.
Sinai Province a jihadist group affiliated with the Islamic State has attacked army and police checkpoints on a regular basis since the army's ouster of the former Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013.
