The vote was initially scheduled for Sunday but was moved to Monday in a closed session, according to lawmaker Mustafa Bakry, AP reported.

The House of Representatives, packed with supporters of President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, is highly likely to vote in favor of sending troops to Libya.

Egypt’s state-run Al-Ahram daily reported on Sunday that the vote in parliament was intended to mandate El-Sisi to “intervene militarily in Libya to help defend the western neighbor against Turkish aggression.”

Libya has been in chaos since 2011 when a popular uprising and a NATO intervention led to the ouster of long-time dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

Since 2014, two rival seats of power have emerged, namely, the internationally-recognized Libyan government, headed by Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj in Tripoli, and another group, based in the eastern city of Tobruk, supported militarily by forces under the command of Khalifa Haftar.

Haftar’s rebel forces — who are militarily backed by the UAE, Russia, and Egypt — launched an offensive to seize the capital and unseat Sarraj’s government in April 2019, triggering some of the most intense fightings in the country.

The government in Tripoli launched a counter-offensive against Haftar-led forces and has recently managed to reverse many of their gains with Turkey’s help.

The Turkish military has been providing air cover, weapons, and allied militants from Syria to help Tripoli repel the assault.

On the other camp, Haftar has been receiving advanced weapons systems from the UAE, one of his major supporters in the offensive on Tripoli.

Egypt has also used its vast border with Libya to funnel weapons and provide logistical support to Haftar, according to reports.

Bin Salman’s arrest of hundreds of potential rivals, including 11 royal princes and many influential Saudi businessmen, is underway in Saudi Arabia under the banner of an anti-corruption drive, but it is still not clear when the detainees would be able to appear in a royal court, the sources told Ray al-Youm, a key news website monitoring developments in the Arab world, on Tuesday.

The princes were arrested not by Saudi security forces but by foreign troops, family members and relatives of the arrested princes confirmed, according to the sources.

The Saudi regime has denied this despite complaints from the princes’ family members.

Muhammad bin Salman, known as MbS, has amassed more power in the last two years than any member of the House of Saud, including its kings. The young prince, who before his father came to power held no position of significance, is now the heir to the throne, minister of defense, chairman of the newly launched “anti-corruption” committee, and, by royal decree, the man in charge of Saudi Arabia’s primary source of wealth, Saudi Aramco.

The concentration of power in the hands of a man who was a junior prince is without precedent in the history of the House of Saud.

The House of Saud, which has governed Saudi Arabia as its personal fiefdom since the Kingdom’s creation in 1932, has long depended on consensus and a somewhat equitable distribution of the country’s wealth—which is regarded as the property of the House of Saud not that of the people of Saudi Arabia—to maintain relatively peaceful relations within the family. For years, there was so much money washing around that it was in no one’s interest to not play by the unwritten rules that govern the dynamics of what is the world’s wealthiest extended family.

MbS has turned the notion of rule by consensus on its head. The prince has rapidly consolidated power in the Kingdom and as the recent purge demonstrates, is intent on destroying any and all rivals before they have time to act against him.

While dozens of leading businessmen and princes have been arrested, two men stood out in terms of their potential to threaten Muhammad bin Salman’s ascension to the throne: Prince Mansour bin Muqrin, who died in a helicopter crash near Yemen this week, and Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah, who has been removed as head of Saudi Arabia’s National Guard.

The late Prince Mansour bin Muqrin was viewed by many within the House of Saud as a level-headed reform minded young prince who was already beginning to demonstrate some skill in his position as deputy governor for Saudi Arabia’s increasingly restive southern province of ‘Asir.

If an adversarial authoritarian regime conducted such a purge and justified it in the same way, the near-unanimous response from the West would be criticism and ridicule, and that response would be appropriate. When MBS and his father do it, they are embraced by the US and their justification is taken at face value by far too many news outlets.