TRIPOLI: NATO warplanes hammered Moammar Gadhafi’s compound with their heaviest airstrikes yet Tuesday after the U.S. said the Libyan leader would “inevitably” be forced out.
The shockwave from the strikes was so powerful that plaster fell from the ceilings in a hotel where foreign reporters were staying, about 2 kilometers from Gadhafi’s compound.

A NATO official said the strikes hit a military facility that had been used to launch attacks on civilians. A Libyan government spokesman said three people had been killed and 150 wounded, and that casualties were local residents.
“It is definitely, in terms of one target, the largest and most concentrated attack we have done to date,” said the NATO official in Brussels.
Libyan government spokesman Mussa Ibrahim said the strikes had targeted a compound of the Popular Guards, an armed unit.

But he said the compound had been emptied of people and “useful material” in anticipation of an attack. “This is another night of bombing and killing by NATO,” Ibrahim told reporters.
“We have degraded his war machine and prevented a humanitarian catastrophe,” U.S. President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron wrote in Britain’s Times newspaper. “And we will continue to enforce the U.N. resolutions with our allies until they are completely complied with.”
Gadhafi denies his forces target civilians and describes the rebels as criminals and religious extremists.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a London news conference Monday: “We do believe that time is working against Gadhafi, that he cannot re-establish control over the country.”

She said the opposition had organized a legitimate interim council that was committed to democracy.
“Their military forces are improving and when Gadhafi inevitably leaves, a new Libya stands ready to move forward,” she said. “We have a lot of confidence in our efforts.”
The United States bolstered the credentials of the rebel National Transitional Council as a potential government-in-waiting Tuesday when a senior U.S. envoy invited it to set up a representative office in Washington.
Unlike France, Italy and Qatar, the U.S. has not established formal diplomatic ties with the rebels.

Jordan’s Foreign Minister Nasser Joudeh said Tuesday the kingdom recognized Libya’s rebel council as a legitimate representative of Libya’s people and planned to open an office in the rebel-held city of Benghazi.
“We consider [the Benghazi-based Transitional National Council] a legitimate representative of the Libyan people … It adopts stances that reflect the demands of the Libyan people and their hopes to move to a new stage,” Joudeh was quoted as saying by Petra state news agency.
Rebels trying to end Gadhafi’s 41-year rule control the east of the oil-producing country, but the conflict has been deadlocked for weeks.
French officials said Monday that France and Britain would deploy attack helicopters, a step aimed at targeting Gadhafi’s forces more precisely.

Seeking to counter fears in Western capitals that NATO could be sucked into a long conflict, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe told the French parliament the mission in Libya “would not last longer than a few months”.
But the use of helicopters carries risks for NATO, as they would fly lower than warplanes and be more exposed to ground fire.

The downing of helicopters, and any attempts to rescue the crews, could suck Western governments into the ground war which they had promised to avoid.
British Armed Forces Minister Nick Harvey said Britain had not taking a decision on deploying helicopters. “It is an option which we are considering and at some point in the future we may get to the point of deciding to go down this route,” he said.

Reporters, whose movements are tightly controlled by the Libyan authorities, were taken to visit Tripoli’s central hospital after the heavy night raids.
They were shown the corpses of three men with head injuries, their bodies laid out on gurneys.
A man who identified himself only as Hatim, who had deep gashes and abrasions on his arms and legs, said the blasts had caved in part of his residence near the military compound. “We were in the house and then, wham, the ceiling came down, right on me,” he said.

A Reuters reporter in the city of Misrata, 200 kilometers east of the Libyan capital, said the western district of Defniyah had come under light shelling from pro-Gadhafi forces, but this had stopped later in the day.
Earlier Tuesday, Tunisian troops fired tear gas and warning shots around a camp on the border with Libya to disperse fighting among refugees and local residents, a witness said.
The United Nations refugee agency has wisely decided to take no chances and has decided to evacuate its entire staff because of the violent unrest, said spokeswoman Sybella Wilkes in Geneva and spokesman Firas Kayal in Tunisia.