European Union foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton on Wednesday urged "utmost restraint" from Egypt's security forces following a deadly crackdown on supporters of ousted president Mohammed Morsi.

"Confrontation and violence is not the way forward to resolve key political issues," Ashton said in a statement.

Jordan's opposition Islamists urged Egyptians to hold street protests to condemn Wednesday's deadly crackdown on demonstrators loyal to ousted president Mohammed Morsi, warning the Arab world's fate was at stake.

Security forces supported by bulldozers moved in on empty two huge pro-Morsi protest camps in Cairo, leaving scores dead in a long-threatened crackdown.

Egypt's Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam's main seat of learning, on Wednesday distanced itself from the crackdown on protesters loyal to ousted president Mohammed Morsi which left dozens dead.

"Al-Azhar stresses to all Egyptians that it did not know about the methods used for the dispersal of the protests except through media channels," Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayyeb said in a televised statement.

Supporters of deposed Islamist president Mohammed Morsi torched three churches in central Egypt on Wednesday in reprisal attacks as police dispersed demonstrations in Cairo, reports said.

The assailants threw firebombs at Mar Gergiss church in Sohag, a city with a large community of Coptic Christians who comprise up to 10 percent of Egypt's 84 million people, causing it to burn down, the official MENA news agency said.

Bahraini security forces deployed as Shiite-led opposition activists called for a mass rally on Wednesday against the Gulf state's Sunni rulers near the U.S. embassy in defiance of a ban.

The interior ministry said the deployment that began on Tuesday was aimed at "preserving security and order, and to guarantee an easy flow of traffic".

Egypt declared a month-long state of emergency Wednesday as violence raged across the country following a crackdown on supporters of ousted president Mohammed Morsi.

Security forces stormed two huge Cairo protest camps occupied for weeks by supporters of Morsi, leaving at least 149 people dead in a crackdown that turned into a bloodbath.

Dozens of children were among a group of 163 immigrants rescued off the Italian coast on Tuesday, sparking immediate calls from local officials for emergency funds to help for their care.

The immigrants, mostly from Egypt and Syria, were spotted by the Italian coastguard as they headed towards Sicily on a 27-meter-long boat.

Egyptian police fired tear gas to break up clashes between supporters of ousted president Mohammed Morsi and residents of a central Cairo neighborhood, Agence France Presse correspondents said.

The clashes began when dozens of religious scholars affiliated with Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood entered the ministry of endowments and were ordered out by police, a security official said.

The United States urged Egypt's new leaders Monday to halt all "politically motivated arrests and detentions," but there was no specific mention of the future of ousted president Mohamed Morsi.

State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf said the continued holding of people in custody was one of the problems Egypt has to resolve on its own if it is to move beyond the political unrest of the past six weeks.

Israel intercepted and destroyed a rocket fired from Egyptian territory at the Red Sea town of Eilat overnight, Israeli public radio said Tuesday.

A jihadist group had earlier said they fired a Grad rocket at Eilat in retaliation for an alleged Israeli air raid.