The UN secretary general has called for an end to indiscriminate attacks on civilians in Libya and warned of "carnage" in the days ahead. Ban Ki-moon has also dispatched a team to Tripoli to assess the humanitarian situation in the wake of the Libyan regime's "disproportionate use of force".Ban's intervention on Sunday came as rebel forces continued to battle Gaddafi's troops for control of key towns and cities, and Britain assessed the embarrassing fallout from the botched SAS mission to establish contacts with rebel leaders.
Seven people are reported to have died and 50 injured in the battle for Bin Jawad, 100 miles away from Gaddafi's home town of Sirte, but after fierce fighting on Sunday rebel leaders claimed to have fought off government forces in the towns of Zawiyah, to the west of Tripoli, and Misrata to the east.
The dictator's counterattack in recent days has raised fears of a protracted civil war, rather than the swift revolutions seen in Egypt and Tunisia.
A UN statement said Ban was "deeply concerned about the fighting in western Libya, which is claiming large numbers of lives and threatens even more carnage in the days ahead. He notes that civilians are bearing the brunt of the violence, and calls for an immediate halt to the government's disproportionate use of force and indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets".
Ban also called on the Libyan government to give "urgent and unimpeded access" to parts of the country affected by the violence and to lift restrictions on the media.
Ban discussed the "increasingly troubling humanitarian situation" with the Libyan foreign minister, Musa Kusa, in a telephone conversation and appointed a former foreign minister of Jordan, Abdelilah Al-Khatib, as his special envoy to Libya to undertake urgent consultations with the authorities in Tripoli and in the region.
The UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) called for access to the western city of Misrata, which has been under attack by government forces. "Humanitarian organisations need urgent access now. People are injured and dying and need help immediately," said under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief co-ordinator Valerie Amos.
A doctor in Misrata told the BBC that 21 dead and more than 100 wounded had arrived at his hospital, which he said was also targeted by government troops. "They bombed all the houses with heavy weapons. They intentionally gunned and exploded our drug store. They bombed even around our hospital but fortunately nobody was injured. More than five mosques which I know are bombed."
Misrata, with a population of 300,000, is the largest rebel-held town outside the opposition strongholds in the east of the country.
The UN also said numbers of people using the border crossing to Tunisia had dropped dramatically since Libyan authorities had taken control of it. About 100,000 people, many migrant workers, are thought to have used it since the unrest began, but numbers had dropped from around 20,000 a day at the peak to "several hundred", amid claims of intimidation by government forces.
