Italy says 7,000 people saved from Mediterranean crossing in two days

More than 2,000 people were rescued from overcrowded boats in the Mediterranean on Friday, Italy's coastguard said, as smugglers have stepped up operations amid two days of good weather.

About 7,100 people have been plucked from international waters since Thursday, many of them on the dangerous journey from Libya, the Reuters news agency said.

The Topaz Responder, a ship run by the Malta-based humanitarian group Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS), said on Thursday that two dozen migrant boats had been spotted at sea about 20 nautical miles off the Libyan port of Sabratha.

Libya's navy intercepted about 1,000 migrants aboard eight rubber boats off Sabratha on Thursday morning, spokesman Ayoub Qassem said. 

"The mass movement is probably the result of week-long, unfavourable weather conditions" that have come to an end, MOAS said on Twitter.

The Topaz Responder picked up 382 sub-Saharan African migrants from three large rubber boats. The Bourbon Argos, a ship run by humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders, rescued 1,139 migrants from 10 boats, and two other humanitarian vessels picked up 156 more.

An agreement between Turkey and the EU to stop migrant departures for the Greek islands has reduced such arrivals in the Aegean by 98 percent during the first five months of the year from the same period of 2015, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said.

But arrivals in Italy continue at about the same pace as last year, and the more dangerous central Mediterranean route has already claimed 2,438 lives, IOM said.

Italy has been on the front lines of Europe's worst immigration crisis since World War Two, now in its third year.

More than 320,000 boat migrants made the voyage to Italy from North Africa in 2014-15.

As of Wednesday, 56,328 boat migrants had arrived in Italy in 2016, a 5.5 percent decrease from the same period last year, according to the interior ministry.