CAIRO: The post-uprising presidents of Egypt and Tunisia said at a news conference yesterday they backed the revolt in Syria but they also opposed foreign military intervention against Bashar Assad.

Egypt’s President Muhammad Mursi and his Tunisian counterpart Moncef Marzouki also expressed their support for the Palestinians, and called on the feuding Fatah and Hamas factions to reconcile.

“We are with the Syrian people and their struggle and revolution,” said Mursi, who was elected his country’s first civilian and Islamist president more than a year after a revolt overthrew veteran dictator Hosni Mubarak.

“We are against foreign military intervention in Syria,” he added.

Marzouki, who met Mursi in his Cairo headquarters before the news conference, said military intervention aimed at stopping Assad’s crackdown on Syrian rebels and their supporters “would only make matters worse.”

Both presidents said they agreed on supporting the Palestinians, whose negotiations with Israel for a state of their own are stalled amid Israeli settlement construction and Palestinian infighting.

“We agree on supporting the Palestinian cause and Palestinian reconciliation,” said Mursi, whose Muslim Brotherhood movement has historic ties with the Islamist Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip.

Hamas had hailed Mursi’s win in last month’s election against Mubarak’s former prime minister Ahmed Shafiq, who was expected to follow the fallen dictator’s example in favoring Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas’s Fatah.

Mursi said he “stood at the same distance from all Palestinian factions.”

He did not say whether his government will ease border restrictions with Gaza, which Israel and Egypt partly blockaded after Hamas violently routed Fatah from the enclave in 2007.

Marzouki said he was “happy to see that the new Egypt will open its heart and borders to our brothers, especially in Gaza.”

In campaign speeches, Mursi supported the Palestinians’ “right to resistance” and their demand that refugees return to homes lost during the 1948 war that uprooted most Palestinians in Israel.

Since his election, he has adopted a more subdued tone, stressing that his government would respect Egypt’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel.