TRIPOLI/MISRATA: NATO planes pounded Libyan government targets Monday but stalemate in the rebel war to unseat Moammar Gadhafi has presented Western powers with a dilemma over whether to offer covert aid to the rebel cause.

Rebels said that four times during the day NATO bombed government weapons depots around 30 kilometers southeast of Zintan, a town in the Western Mountains region where conflict is escalating.

He 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.

A ferocious assault from Tripoli has left hundreds dead over several weeks of fighting.

Two months into a conflict linked to this year’s uprisings in other Arab countries, rebels hold Benghazi and towns in the east while the government controls the capital and other cities.

The government says most Libyans support Gadhafi, the rebels are armed criminals and Al-Qaeda militants, and NATO’s intervention is an act of colonial aggression by Western powers seeking to steal the country’s oil.

Libyan state television reinforced that view, saying NATO warships bombed “military and civilian targets” in Misrata and in the adjacent town of Zlitan Monday.

The military deadlock confronts allies including the United States, Britain and France with 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 alternative would be to circumvent the sanctions secretly but both courses risk angering Russia and China who wield vetoes on the U.N. Security Council and are increasingly critical of NATO’s operation to protect civilians in Libya.

“The problem for the West is that several key players on the council now feel the authority they granted was abused and they’re not inclined to help the West extricate itself,” said David Bosco of American University in Washington.

The rebels face a government with superior firepower and resources.

Given the rebels’ failure to achieve their primary target of unseating Gadhafi, the war is increasingly focused on Misrata, Zintan and a border crossing near the Tunisian town of Dehiba.

Two rebel spokesmen in Misrata spoke of intense fighting in the city and at its strategically important airport.

“There is fighting also near the airport. The revolutionaries control the western side while the [government] brigades are still holding the southeastern side of the airport. NATO struck today in the areas of Tamina and Chantine, east of the city,” Reda said by telephone.

Rebels are trying to extinguish fires at a fuel storage depot bombarded by the government Friday. The attack created fuel shortages, rebel spokesman Abdelsalam said.

Rebels warned that residents of Misrata could run out of food and water within a month if they are not provided with “game-changing” weapons to defeat Gadhafi’s forces.

Because of shelling of the city’s port over the past two weeks, only one aid ship a week is now reaching Misrata, said a spokesman in the eastern rebel bastion of Benghazi.

A ship chartered by the International Committee of the Red Cross arrived in Misrata Monday.

The latest shipment of aid to land in the port Monday morning was carrying surgical kits, spare parts to repair water and electrical supply systems, and 8,000 jars of baby food, the Red Cross said in a statement.

Simon Brooks, the ICRC’s head of mission in Benghazi, said: “We will also continue vital work with a view to reducing the danger of unexploded devices in the streets of Misrata.” Misrata is seen as key to the Libyan conflict.

The Red Cross expressed concern about the reports that Gadhafi’s forces had dropped mines into Misrata’s harbor Friday using helicopters with its emblem, and that of the Red Crescent.

“The alleged practices, if true, represent a serious misuse of the emblem,” Georgios Georgantas, its deputy head of operations for North and West Africa, was quoted as saying.

Evidence of mounting conflict in the Western Mountains came at a small clinic in the Tunisian frontier town of Dehiba. Rebels seized the Dehiba border crossing in April, opening a conduit for supplies going in and a point of departure for wounded fighters from Zintan seeking treatment.

Most at the clinic had been shot at close quarters as they tried to hold back loyalists east of Zintan, a town in rebel hands. Eleven died Saturday alone, their names displayed at a refugee camp in Dehiba that lodges their families.

“They are heroes, they are Mujahideen,” said Jamal Maghroub, whose nephew was among those killed.

New York-based Human Rights Watch accused loyalist forces Monday of “repeated indiscriminate attacks” on residential areas in the mountain towns of Nalut, Takut and Zintan.

NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said late Sunday that “the game is over for Gadhafi” who “should realize sooner rather than later that there’s no future for him or his regime.”

“We have stopped Gadhafi in his tracks. His time is running out. He’s more and more isolated,” he told CNN.

Rasmussen expressed optimism that Gadhafi would ultimately lose his decades-old grip on power given the “wind of change” sweeping the Arab world, the death of Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and mounting pressure on the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, a woman who accused Gadhafi’s soldiers of raping her has escaped to Qatar with the help of rebels, a Libyan rebel official said Monday.

“Iman al-Obeidi was able to leave Libya through Al-Jabal al-Gharbi with the help of rebels,” the official said, asking not to be named. She had escaped through a mountainous area southwest of Tripoli, near the border with Tunisia. The official said the young woman was in Doha, an ally of the rebel movement, where she would meet the press in coming days.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch appealed on her behalf last month.

Obeidi attracted international media attention when she stormed into the Rixos hotel March 26, threw open her coat to reveal scars and bruises on her body to expose her ordeal.

But as she screamed, “Film me, film me, show the whole world all they did to me,” she was dragged off by security guards amid scenes of mayhem as journalists’ efforts to intervene were shoved aside. – Reuters, AFP