No end in sight to Egypt violence as week’s toll hits 750

Egyptian soldiers today entered mosque in Cairo where Islamist protesters in favour of ousted president Mohammed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood had holed up overnight after two days of high-intensity clashes.

The private Egyptian ONTV Live television channel showed the soldiers entering, while Al-Jazeera's Egypt affiliate streamed footage on its website of the soldiers inside the mosque. They appeared to be negotiating with the protesters, attempting to persuade them to leave.

The death toll in violence since Wednesday is now around 750, with well over 100 reported to have been killed on Friday. The country now increasingly seems to be headed for total anarchy, as Islamists and other opponents of last month's military takeover fight security forces and their civilian allies in street battles across the capital and other cities.

On Friday, terrified protesters caught in a cross-fire jumped or fell from an overpass in a panicked effort to escape. A gunfight erupted on the doorstep of a Four Seasons hotel.

Men wielding guns and machetes - some backing the Islamists, others police supporters in civilian clothes, others simply criminals - roamed the streets of the capital and other cities, and it was apparently often impossible to tell friend from foe.

Health Ministry officials said Friday's civilian toll was 27, but late Friday afternoon more than 30 uncounted corpses were seen at a field hospital in a mosque near the centre of the fighting, in Cairo's Ramses Square.

Defying a 7 pm curfew, antagonists battled there into the night, lit by an unchecked fire that consumed a nearby office building.

The military-appointed government issued a statement declaring that the military, the police and the people were ''standing together in the face of the treacherous terrorist scheme against Egypt of the Brotherhood organization.''

France and Germany called for an emergency meeting of European foreign ministers to respond to Egypt's violence. ''The toll of death and injury is shocking,'' said Catherine Aston, the top diplomat for the European Union. ''Responsibility for this tragedy weighs heavily on the interim government, as well as on the wider political leadership in the country.''

Just two days earlier, the police had routed thousands of protesters from sit-ins in support of Morsi and his Brotherhood, killing several hundred. The government suspended legal protections against arbitrary police action and authorized security forces to kill anyone who threatened a public facility (See: Morsi supporters plan more protests in Cairo).

The violence started soon after noon prayers. For the first time since Morsi's removal six weeks ago, some non-Islamists stood with the Morsi supporters, sometimes risking their own lives as well.

There was no sign that the chaos would end anytime soon. The Muslim Brotherhood, the main Islamist group behind Morsi, called for marches every day for the next week, and vowed to hold daily, nonviolent marches to Ramses Square for morning and evening prayers, paraphrasing American independence leader and later President Thomas Jefferson to say that bloodshed ''irrigates the tree of liberty in Egypt''.