Story highlights Children, along with women and men, are among the dead and injured

Egypt said it responded with airstrikes against terrorist camps

(CNN) The death toll in Friday's attack on buses carrying Coptic Christians in Egypt has risen to 29, officials said, as the Islamist terror group ISIS claimed responsibility for the massacre.

The buses were on a desert road headed to a monastery in the Minya governorate south of Cairo when assailants wearing fatigues and masks fired on them from three four-wheel-drive vehicles, Egypt's Interior Ministry said.

Hours later, Egypt responded with airstrikes against terrorist camps, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said in an on-camera statement, according to state-run Nile TV. The exact location of Friday's airstrikes was unclear, but Nile TV reported that Egypt has targeted terrorists in the Sinai Peninsula and on the border with Libya.

Friday's attack, which killed children as well as men and women, is the latest major deadly assault against minority Christians in the Middle East's most populous country.

Persecution of Egypt's Christians has spiked since the toppling of Hosni Mubarak's regime in 2011 , and as an ISIS affiliate wages an insurgency on Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. ISIS militants have targeted Coptic Christians several times in recent years, triggering a mass exodus of Christians from some towns.

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