Egypt's ailing ex-president Hosni Mubarak was back in court Saturday on charges of complicity in the deaths of protesters in 2011, with former officials to be questioned over his alleged role.

The 85-year-old former strongman, wearing his trademark sunglasses, was brought into the courtroom in a wheelchair for the hearing from a military hospital where he is being detained.

Thousands of Mohammed Morsi's supporters rallied on Friday in Cairo against the military, as supporters and opponents of the deposed Islamist president clashed elsewhere in Egypt.

The rallies come nearly a month after the August 14 crackdown by security forces on two pro-Morsi protest camps in Cairo that led to clashes in which hundreds of people were killed, the worst carnage in Egypt's recent history.

Around 3,300 Syrians have arrived in Italy by boat over recent weeks, many fleeing troubled Egypt where they had first found a haven from war, the U.N. refugee agency said Friday.

UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards said that the bulk of the refugees were families, and arrived over the past 40 days, mostly in Sicily. Some 670 landed in the past week.

Egyptian military helicopters on Friday carried out air strikes on Islamist militant positions in Sinai, two days after suicide bombers killed six soldiers in the restive peninsula, security sources said.

Apache helicopters targeted hideouts and vehicles used by the militants near the town of Sheikh Zuwayid in northern Sinai, the sources said.

The United States called again Thursday on Egypt's interim authorities to lift a state of emergency in force since August, which Cairo said it is extending for two months.

"We remain opposed, as we have from the beginning, to the state of emergency. And we urge the interim government to end it immediately," State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters.

A little known jihadist group in Egypt's Sinai on Thursday claimed responsibility for two car bombings that killed six Egyptian soldiers a day earlier in the border town of Rafah.

Jund al-Islam, or Islam's Soldiers in English, made the claim in a statement posted on militant Islamist forums.

Two Egyptian army tanks crossed an initial border fence leading to Gaza for the first time on Thursday, witnesses said, but did not enter the Palestinian territory itself.

Gaza's Hamas rulers neither confirmed nor denied the incursion, but said no Egyptian tanks had entered the besieged Strip.

Egypt's interim authorities on Thursday extended a state of emergency in force since mid-August by another two months because of the country's continued insecurity.

President Adly Mansour had initially announced a month-long state of emergency on August 14, at a time when deadly unrest swept Egypt as police dispersed two Islamist protest camps.

Qatari-owned news channel al-Jazeera has launched legal action against the Egyptian authorities, saying that its journalists have been detained without charge and attacked, its London-based lawyers announced Thursday.

The network said it had asked renowned legal firm Carter-Ruck, a specialist in international law, to take action in the international courts and before the United Nations over accusations of harassment.

Twin car bomb blasts on Wednesday targeting Egypt's army killed at least six soldiers in the restive Sinai peninsula, where the military is battling Islamist militants, officials said.

Security officials said an explosion targeted the military intelligence headquarters in Rafah on the border with the Gaza Strip, minutes before a second explosion hit an army checkpoint nearby.