Gen. Bacha Debele on Tigray

Ethiopia says the dam is essential to its development and has repeatedly sought to reassure Egypt. But Cairo’s efforts to persuade Addis Ababa to engage in closer coordination over the dam appear to have made little headway.

Elissa sought to reassure Egyptians in televised comments while attending the inauguration a fish farm in the Nile Delta province of AFR sheikh, but stressed that “water is a matter of life or death.”

“No one can touch Egypt’s share of water,” he said.

The Nile provides over 90 percent of Egypt’s water supply. It already receives the lion’s share of Nile waters — more than 55 billion of the around 88 billion cubic meters of water that flow down the river each year.