Earlier, officials said that 10 to 15 people lay buried in the ruins of one building alone, though the only casualty seen by Western reporters who were bused to the scene was a man who was pulled from the rubble while they were there, identified by officials as a cleaner.

In the absence of any visible rescue operations, the man’s body had been spotted by an American television crew, then laid out beneath a green sheet on a rubble-strewn roadway while an ambulance was summoned. Officials said the extent of the devastation made it impossible for the heavy machinery needed to search for bodies to reach the area.

In a city grown accustomed to the NATO raids, the attacks caused a heightened level of alarm, partly because they began so early in the day, when this capital of 2.5 million people was busy with its daily routines. Most of the nearly 4,000 strike sorties flown by NATO since the air war began in March have been carried out deep into the night, partly, NATO officials have said, to minimize the risk of civilian casualties. But Tuesday’s daylight raids emptied much of the city of traffic, with stores in large areas of the city shuttered and the few people out hurrying to complete their business and find shelter.

Colonel Qaddafi’s nine-minute audio message was his first public pronouncement in nearly four weeks, when he spoke after an earlier NATO attack on the Tripoli command compound. That message, also delivered in a recorded radio address, struck a defiant posture, telling NATO that he was “in a place where you can’t reach me — in the hearts of my people.”

On Tuesday, the words seemed to aim at the morale-boosting tone of Winston Churchill’s speeches when Britain faced the threat of German invasion in 1940. “The Libyan people right now are living hours of glory of which future generations will be proud,” Colonel Qaddafi said. “Our children and our grandchildren will be proud of us and of our resilience and courage today. We shall defeat the enemy; our fate does not matter.”