Britain, France and the group of 57 Islamic nations each launched operations to rescue refugees today.
The moves came as UN experts warned of an urgent need to prevent racially charged violent clashes among a crush of people fleeing Libya to Tunisia and Egypt.
With more than 140,000 refugees pouring over the borders and tens of thousands more arriving by the day, Prime Minister David Cameron said he had launched an airlift to help Egyptians stranded on the Libyan-Tunisian border.
France, too, announced an airlift and naval operation. The French Foreign Ministry said it would involve large airliners and a French Navy ship heading to the region to evacuate at least 5,000 Egyptian refugees and return them to Egypt within a week. France is also "studying means to provide tents and emergency equipment to vulnerable people" who remain in Libya, it said.
It said the operation was being carried out in co-ordination with the European Union.
The 57-nation Organisation of The Islamic Conference said it would set up two fully equipped field hospitals and provide ambulances on the Tunisian and Egyptian sides of their borders with Libya.
The group's emergency plan also called for providing temporary shelters for 10,000 people and handing out flour, sugar, rice, canned food and infant formula to the vast number of refugees camping out in those places.
UN experts warned of an urgent need to protect sub-Saharan Africans, foreigners, migrant workers and other minorities caught up in the fast-developing humanitarian crisis.
The UN committee responsible for monitoring racial discrimination worldwide said the UN and its member governments must act to prevent further bloodshed.
The committee's 18 independent human rights experts - who oversee a 1969 treaty that is the main international legal instrument protecting against discrimination on the basis of race - formally alerted the world's nations to "the risk of inter-ethnic violence and divisions which might worsen the deteriorating situation in Libya."
Human Rights Watch also warned of a backlash against Gaddafi's use of sub-Saharan African mercenaries to quash the uprisings.
The group said African workers fleeing the violence are "particularly under threat due to popular anger" over Gaddafi's mercenaries.
The UN's refugee agency and the International Organisation for Migration also said they were joining forces in an effort to ease a humanitarian crisis at the Libya-Tunisian border, where the overcrowding "worsens by the hour."
More than 75,000 people have crossed that border since February 19, officials said, most of them Egyptians.
"Most have been travelling for three or four days. They are walking and have had nothing to eat for up to 48 hours," said a World Food Programme spokeswoman.
"The majority of the people coming across the border are young Tunisian and Egyptian men who were working in Libya. Tens of thousands are coming every day," she said. "They don't stop here for long - but travel on to their homes in Egypt and Tunisia."
Another 40,000 more are waiting on the Libyan side of the border to enter Tunisia. Tens of thousands more have crossed over from Libya into Egypt.
So far, the UN says, only 3,500 Libyans have crossed into Egypt, and all had friends or family there and didn't need help.
An estimated one million children in western Libya are in harm's way as Gaddafi's forces fight protesters for control of key towns and cities, including the capital Tripoli, the international charity Save the Children said Wednesday.