Neighbors who witnessed Sunday’s attack said it took place at about 1:15 a.m., at the same time that foreign journalists lodged at the Rixos Hotel in the capital heard a large blast rattle windows. A few moments later, an agitated Qaddafi spokesman began urgently summoning the reporters for a bus ride to the bombing site, saying that the bodies of civilians were still in the rubble.

When the journalists arrived, a body was sitting in an open ambulance. Another was carried out as emergency workers and neighborhood men pulled away the wreckage of a large cinderblock home. A short while later, reporters were taken to the Tripoli hospital and shown the bodies of a third adult and a baby, laid alongside the first two. A small child arrived on a stretcher, dead either on arrival or soon after. All the bodies appeared caked in dust from the rubble.

A Qaddafi spokesman said the destroyed home had housed 15 members of an extended family named al-Ghrari.

The home sat in a working-class neighborhood in the Souq al-Juma area, which is known as a hotbed of opposition to the Qaddafi government. As the journalists visited in early Sunday, and during another call later, a few neighbors tried without evidence to argue that the Qaddafi government had set off the blast or planted the bodies. But others who said that they opposed Colonel Qaddafi confirmed an airstrike.

There were no indications of any military facility in the area. Children’s shoes, diapers, a woman’s dress and kitchen tools lay amid the wreckage early Sunday. The blast knocked the top off the structure, leaving a concrete staircase reaching into the air. Several carports on the block collapsed, crushing the vehicles within. A neighbor a block away invited reporters into his home to show shattered glass from windows and doors, and said his wife had been taken to the hospital with wounds from the shards.

“Why did they bomb a civilian house?” asked Abdul Rouf, 26, another neighbor, who said he had run to his roof when he heard jets overhead and watched a missile hit the house.

Khalid Kaim, a deputy foreign minister, arrived at the scene not long after the blast and told journalists it gave the lie to NATO’s stated mission of protecting civilians from Colonel Qaddafi’s wrath for challenging his rule. “We have seen who is attacking civilians,” he said. “They are targeting houses and flats. Tomorrow they will target schools and hospitals.”

Perhaps wary of recent attacks by small groups of rebels against Qaddafi forces here, one of the government minders taking the journalists to the bombed house and the hospital in the middle of the night brought along his assault rifle.