(Reuters) - NATO carried out missile strikes on targets in the Tripoli area on Tuesday that appeared to include Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's compound, witnesses said.
Gaddafi has not appeared publicly since April 30 when a NATO air strike on a house in the capital killed his youngest son and three of his grandchildren, raising questions among some Arab diplomats anxious to know why he has remained out of sight.
Libyan officials said NATO airstrikes in the Tripoli area overnight wounded four children and two of them were seriously hurt by flying glass caused by blasts.
Officials showed foreign journalists a hospital in the capital where some windows were shattered apparently by blast waves from a NATO strike that toppled a nearby telecommunications tower.
The journalists were also taken to a government building housing the high commission for children that had been completely destroyed. The old colonial building was damaged before in what officials said was a NATO bombing on April 30.
"The direction of at least one blast suggests Gaddafi's compound has been targeted," said one witness.
No other information was immediately available. But the Tripoli blasts occurred against a backdrop of deadlock in an insurgency that aims to end Gaddafi's 41 years in power and a resulting dilemma for Western powers over whether to offer covert aid to the rebels.
Allies including the United States, Britain and France face a choice over whether to exploit loopholes in the sanctions regime they engineered in February and March to help the rebels, analysts and U.N. diplomats said.
Another option would be to circumvent the sanctions secretly but both courses risk angering Russia and China. They wield U.N. Security Council vetoes and are increasingly critical of NATO's operations under a resolution aimed at protecting civilians.
REBELS BESIEGED
The government says most Libyans support Gaddafi. It calls the rebels armed criminals and al Qaeda militants and says NATO's intervention is an act of colonial aggression by Western powers intent on stealing the country's oil.
After two months of conflict linked to this year's uprisings in other Arab countries, rebels hold Benghazi and other towns in the east while the government controls the capital and almost all of the west of the North African state.
Fighting is escalating in the Western Mountains region near Tunisia and rebels on Monday said NATO struck government arms depots southeast of the battleground town of Zintan.
The town was quiet on Tuesday with no government shelling or NATO air strikes, rebel spokesman Abdulrahman said by telephone.
"The revolutionaries (rebels) are combing the area of Awiniyah where the brigades are believed to be positioned," he said. The town is 25 km (16 miles) east of Zintan.
NATO forces have also struck repeatedly at Misrata, the western city where besieged rebels have clung on for weeks in the face of a ferocious government assault. Hundreds have died in the fighting.
The rebels face a government with superior firepower and resources but a rebel military commander told Al Jazeera television his fighters killed 57 troops and destroyed 17 military vehicles during a major battle west of the insurgent-held city of Ajdabiyah on Monday.
The commander also said two rebels were killed in the fighting halfway between Ajdabiyah and the oil port of Brega, where Gaddafi forces are entrenched. His statement could not immediately be verified.
The war has killed thousands and caused misery for tens of thousands of migrants forced to flee overland or by boat. Hundreds have drowned on unseaworthy vessels trying to cross the Mediterranean.
Aid agencies say witnesses reported a vessel carrying between 500 and 600 people foundered late last week near Tripoli and many bodies were seen in the water.
"The tragic truth is we will probably never know how many people drowned in this latest tragedy," said Jean-Philippe Chauzy, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration.
Even before that, around 800 people have gone missing since March 25 after trying to escape Libya, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Most were from sub-Saharan Africa.
(Reporting by Joseph Nasr in Berlin, Hamid Ould Ahmed in Algiers, Louis Charbonneau in New York, Barbara Lewis in Geneva and Sami Aboudi in Cairo; writing by Matthew Bigg, editing by Giles Elgood)
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