The Italian navy rescued 3,000 migrants aboard more than a dozen boats in the Mediterranean today after receiving requests for help from 22 vessels, the coast guard said.
Operations are continuing and it is still unclear where the people will be taken, a spokesman said.
Europe is struggling to cope with record influx of refugees as migrants flee war in Middle Eastern countries such as Syria.
The Mediterranean has become the world's most deadly crossing point for migrants. More than 2,300 people have died this year in attempts to reach Europe by boat, according to the International Organisation for Migration.
Elsewhere, thousands of rain-soaked migrants stormed across Macedonia's border as police lobbed stun grenades and beat them with batons, seeking to enforce a decree to stem their flow through the Balkans to western Europe.
Security forces had managed to contain around 1,500 people in no-man's land, but they later entered Macedonia.
Several thousand others - many of them Syrian refugees – had already torn through muddy fields to Macedonian territory after days spent in the open without access to shelter, food or water.
Macedonia on Thursday declared a state of emergency and ordered its borders sealed to migrants, many of them refugees from war who have been entering from Greece at a rate of 2,000 per day en route to Hungary and Europe's borderless Schengen zone.
