“NATO confirms that it was operating in Tripoli last night, conducting airstrikes against a legitimate military target,” Wing commander Mike Bracken said in a statement Sunday afternoon.

He said the alliance was looking into the reports. “NATO deeply regrets any civilian loss of life during this operation and would be very sorry if the review of this incident concluded it to be a NATO weapon,” Bracken said.

Foreign Minister Abdul-Ati Al-Obeidi told reporters nine civilians, including two children, were killed in the explosion and said 18 people were wounded. He said the strike was a “deliberate attack on a civilian neighborhood,” and follows other alleged targeting of nonmilitary targets such as a hotel, oxygen factory and civilian vehicles.

“The deliberate bombing ... is a direct call for all free peoples of the world and for all Muslims to initiate a global jihad against the oppressive, criminal West and never to allow such criminal organizations as NATO to decide the future of other independent and sovereign nations,” Al-Obeidi said. He did not take questions.

Journalists were taken to Al-Arada district of Tripoli before 1 a.m. (2300 GMT Saturday) to see rescue teams helped by bystanders desperately searching for survivors among the wreckage of a two-story block of flats.

Journalists saw two bodies pulled from the rubble. Journalists were then taken to a Tripoli hospital where they were shown the bodies of a woman and two toddlers who officials said were members of the same family and had died in the raid.

Government spokesman Mussa Ibrahim said he feared the death toll would rise as the building was home to at least 15 people.

Libyan claims of civilian casualties from NATO attacks have sometimes been received skeptically by international observers. On one occasion, Libyan officials presented a wounded child as the victim of an air strike but medical staff passed a note to a foreign journalist saying she was hurt in a road accident.

Meanwhile, rebels from the city of Misrata, about 200 km east of Tripoli, have been trying to push west toward the capital but on Sunday they took heavy casualties when they came under fire from pro-Qaddafi forces.

Four fighters were killed and 18 wounded, according to a doctor at a field hospital near the front line in Dafniyah, an area just west of Misrata. A reporter at the field hospital said he saw a procession of pickup trucks arriving from the front carrying the wounded and the dead, some of them covered up with blankets. “Qaddafi’s forces were underground (in trenches). We were patrolling and they ambushed us,” said fighter Mohammed Swelhi, whose friend, Mustafa, was one of two bodies brought from the front in the back of a truck.

“My cousin was injured yesterday. And today my friend was killed. My group, we’re all close friends,” he said. “We don’t know what NATO is doing,” said the doctor, called Nury, who was tending the wounded at the field hospital.