Egypt's ruling military warned on Friday that it would deal "firmly" with any attempt to harm the public interest as thousands of people packed Cairo's iconic Tahrir Square accusing it of a power grab.

The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which took over when veteran strongman Hosni Mubarak was ousted by a popular uprising in February last year, also delivered veiled criticism of the Muslim Brotherhood, charging that efforts were afoot to pre-empt the outcome of a hard-fought presidential election.

The French Foreign Ministry called Friday for the Syrian military to desert en masse the day after a Syrian air force colonel defected after landing his MiG fighter in Jordan.

"Yesterday's defection leads us to call on members of the Syrian army and security forces to continue these defections, these desertions and no longer to obey the Damascus regime's criminal orders," ministry spokesman Bernard Valero told journalists.

Syrian protesters took to the streets on Friday as the government accused rebels of carrying out a "brutal massacre" of 25 of its supporters, and activists said regime forces killed at least 55 people across the country.

The independent Syrian Observatory for Human Rights gave a higher toll for the pro-regime losses, saying at least 26 government supporters -- most of them members of the feared shabiha militia -- had been killed.

Ankara denied Friday allegations that it is shipping weapons to Syrian rebels across the border, after a report claimed Turkey was among nations arming rebels fighting the regime in Damascus.

"Turkey does not ship weapons to any neighboring country, including Syria," foreign ministry spokesperson Selcuk Unal said when asked whether Turkey was involved in an alleged arms delivery to Syrian rebels.

Syrian troops clashed with rebels in the third-largest city Homs Friday, scuppering a new bid to rescue trapped civilians as the United Nations said up to 1.5 million people were now in need of aid.

The fresh bombardment of the central, Orontes valley city came after at least 168 died on Thursday, the highest single-day death toll since a U.N.-backed ceasefire was supposed to take effect on April 12, a human rights watchdog said. Activists in Homs reached by Agence France Presse via Skype spoke of a "catastrophic situation" in the historic centre and adjacent neighborhoods.

Thousands packed Cairo's iconic Tahrir Square on Friday to denounce a power grab by the ruling military, as the nation nervously awaited the results of the first post-Mubarak presidential election.

Members and supporters of the powerful Muslim Brotherhood gathered in the square for the protest, which was to be joined later in the afternoon by several secular movements.

Palestinians in the Gaza Strip fired two rockets that hit Israel on Friday, a military spokeswoman said, as a truce declared by the Islamist Hamas ruling the enclave entered its second day.

The spokeswoman told Agence France Presse that the rockets, which struck southern Israel, did not cause casualties or damage.

A man claiming to be the fugitive nephew of late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has requested asylum in Austria after being picked by police in a routine identity check, media reported Friday.

Police spotted the 42-year-old man in the company of two other Iraqi men Thursday at the train station in Traiskirchen, some 10 kilometers (six miles) south of Vienna, Austrian broadcaster ORF reported.

Attacks in Iraq killed at least 12 people and wounded dozens more on Friday, security and medical officials said, in the latest wave of violence sweeping across the country.

A roadside bomb exploded in the morning in the main market in al-Husseiniyah, a Shiite-majority area on Baghdad's northeast outskirts, and another went off after emergency personnel arrived, an interior ministry official said.

At least 143 people were killed in violence across Syria on Thursday, among them 100 civilians and 43 government troops, activists and a rights group said.

"This has been one of the bloodiest days in Syria since the anti-regime revolt broke out in March last year," Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman told Agence France Presse.