Saudi Arabia said on Monday that Arab and Islamic countries will step in to help Egypt if Western nations cut aid packages to Cairo over its deadly crackdown on Islamist protesters.

"To those who have announced they are cutting their aid to Egypt, or threatening to do that, (we say that) Arab and Muslim nations are rich... and will not hesitate to help Egypt," Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said in a statement carried by the kingdom's SPA state news agency.

EU foreign ministers will hold emergency talks Wednesday to forge a response to Egypt's blistering violence, possibly withholding aid or arms while urging a political solution in the key Arab nation.

"We will respond to the current situation," the European Union's special envoy to Egypt, Bernardino Leon, said at the close of hastily called talks between senior diplomats from the bloc's 28 member states.

Egypt is on the "right path", foreign minister Nabil Fahmy said Monday in Sudan on his first trip abroad, after hundreds died in clashes between Egyptian Islamists and security forces.

"Yes there is a crisis but we are on the right path and I believe in the future," he said after talks with his Sudanese counterpart Ali Karti.

Kuwait is to deport nine Egyptian Islamists for participating in protests outside their embassy in the Gulf emirate which bans foreigners from demonstrating, a newspaper said on Monday.

The men were among a group of some 70 protesters who staged two demonstrations outside the Egyptian embassy and consulate last week, to protest a deadly crackdown in Cairo of supporters of Egypt's deposed Islamist president Mohammed Morsi, al-Rai newspaper reported.

The European Union held a first round of emergency talks Monday on the spiraling bloodshed in Egypt amid warnings the bloc was ready to "urgently review" ties with the country.

Ambassadors on the bloc's Political and Security Committee were called away from their summer break for talks in Brussels that kicked off Monday morning after the death toll from five days of violence in Egypt climbed to almost 800.

Militants killed 25 Egypt police Monday in the deadliest attack of its kind in years, as the country struggles to deal with a crisis sparked by the ouster of president Mohammed Morsi.

Sources said militants fire rocket-propelled grenades at two buses carrying police in the Sinai Peninsula, just hours after Egypt's military chief vowed a "forceful" response to violence roiling the Arab world's most populous nation.

Iraq's premier backed the Egyptian military crackdown on supporters of ousted president Mohammed Morsi in a statement Sunday, the latest Arab leader to back the operation.

Nouri al-Maliki appealed for "self-restraint" but said Baghdad stood with the Egyptian government, describing its moves against the Muslim Brotherhood as efforts to impose law and order.

France on Sunday called on Saudi Arabia and Qatar to help find a solution to the crisis in Egypt as it received senior diplomats from the two rival regional powers.

Qatar, considered an ally of ousted Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood, has strongly condemned the intervention by the authorities against the Islamist leader's supporters.

Thirty-six Islamist prisoners were killed in Egypt on Sunday during an attempted prison break, the official MENA news agency reported.

"A security official has confirmed that 36 Muslim Brotherhood elements were killed during an attempt to escape," the agency reported.

Egyptian Nobel laureate Mohammed ElBaradei, who resigned as vice-president in protest over a bloody crackdown on supporters of ousted leader Mohammed Morsi, arrived in Vienna on Sunday.

The respected former chief of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was spotted at the airport in the Austrian capital, but gave no comment to journalists.