Supporters of Tunisia's Islamist-led government rallied Tuesday to mark national women's day ahead of an opposition protest, as the president proposed a national unity cabinet to end a protracted crisis.

The government, led by the Islamist Ennahda party, and its detractors have been locked in a bitter feud sparked by the July assassination of an opposition politician, the second such killing this year.

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.

At least 18 Syrian rebels and a child were killed in violence in the central province of Hama Tuesday, a monitoring group said.

In the north, a prominent Aleppo-based activist went missing, and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it feared the jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) was behind his disappearance.

Syrian opposition activists, including National Coalition members, have drawn up a transitional roadmap including a call for national reconciliation and justice for "all of Syria's victims," a statement said Tuesday.

The roadmap is to be presented in full on Wednesday, in the presence of National Coalition chief Ahmad Jarba, but has not been officially endorsed by the key opposition group.

Jordan denied on Tuesday a U.N. report that organized crime networks operate in the country's Zaatari camp, which hosts 130,000 Syrian refugees.

"There is no such thing as organised crime in Zaatari; there are petty crimes and petty theft," Brigadier Waddah Hmud, head of the Syrian refugee department, told Agence France Presse.

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has asked caretaker prime minister Rami Hamdallah to stay on, tasking him on Tuesday with forming a new government, a spokesman said.

"Abbas on Tuesday met head of the caretaker government Rami Hamdallah and tasked him again with forming a government," the Palestinians' Wafa news agency quoted Abbas spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina as saying.

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.

Bahraini opposition activists, inspired by the success of street protests in Egypt, plan to demonstrate near the U.S. embassy on Wednesday in defiance of a government ban.

The Sunni rulers of the Shiite-majority Gulf kingdom have assumed sweeping new powers to crush demonstrations but the protest organizers insist they will go ahead.

A proposed international peace conference on Syria that aims to bring together President Bashar Assad's allies and the opposition will probably not happen until October at the very earliest, a top Russian official said.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said additional preparatory talks for the meeting will be held between Moscow and Washington at the end of August, and that the diplomatic schedule was already busy for September.

Attacks in Iraq killed 13 people on Tuesday, including four who died in a blast targeting Shiite worshippers, while militants bombed a major oil pipeline, halting exports, officials said.

The attacks are the latest in a surge in violence that security forces have failed to curb, despite carrying out major operations against militants said to have resulted in scores of arrests, including 82 on Monday.