NATO has carried out a number of missile strikes on targets in the Tripoli area today that appeared to include Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's compound.
Gaddafi has not appeared publicly since 30 April, when a NATO air strike on a house in the capital killed his youngest son and three of his grandchildren.
Libyan officials said four children were wounded, two of them seriously, by flying glass caused by blasts from NATO strikes in the Tripoli area overnight.
Officials showed foreign journalists a hospital in the Libyan capital where some windows had been shattered, apparently due to the 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, which had been completely destroyed.
The old colonial building had been damaged before in what officials said was a NATO bombing on 30 April.
'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 a stalemate in the insurgency to unseat Gaddafi and the resulting dilemma for Western powers over whether to offer covert aid to the rebels.
Yesterday, rebels said NATO bombed government arms depots four times during the day about 30 km (20 miles) southeast of Zintan, a town in the Western Mountains region near Tunisia where conflict is escalating.
'The site has some 72 underground hangars made of reinforced concrete.
'We don't know how many were destroyed. But each time the aircraft struck we heard multiple explosions,' a rebel spokesman, who gave his name as Abdulrahman, said by telephone.
Another rebel spokesman said the planes also struck around Tamina and Chantine, east of Misrata, where besieged rebels are clinging on in the last city they control in western Libya.
Gaddafi's forces have conducted a ferocious assault on Misrata and hundreds have been killed in weeks of fighting.
