“It’s a mistake,” said Mr. Abubaker, a college student, who had burns on his face and was struck by bullets in the truck that ignited in the blast.

Another fighter, Ibrahim Fahim al-Oraybey, 19, who had been riding in a pickup with a machine gun mounted on the back, said he saw a shepherd who lost both arms in the blast. Mr. Oraybey was also wounded, with burns on his face, back and shoulders. On Saturday, surgeons amputated his right leg below the knee.

An ambulance driver who arrived at the scene about an hour after the strike said he found only the blackened remains of four trucks and eight or nine bodies so badly burned and mangled by the explosion that he could not determine the exact number.

“I saw the fire, and the bodies, eight or nine bodies,” said the driver, Ahmed al-Ginashi. “They were totally burned.”

On the eastern front and in the besieged western city of Misurata, rebel fighters said Saturday that they were anxious about what they perceived as a slowdown in the airstrikes that enabled Colonel Qaddafi to hold on as his forces regroup and advance. Officials said the airstrikes slowed down last week because of bad weather.

Mohamed, a Misurata resident whose surname was being withheld for the sake of his family’s safety, said that Qaddafi forces had attacked the city again on Saturday morning with tanks and mortars, firing on the Al Jazeera neighborhood near the Mediterranean. He said that at least four people were killed, and that a tally prepared by the hospital on Friday put the death toll from a month of fighting in the city at 230.

On Saturday a Turkish relief boat arrived to evacuate some wounded patients, he said.

The battle lines in the east, just east of Brega, remained largely unchanged, with Qaddafi forces in control of the city. Although airstrikes have taken out some of the government’s tanks and heavy weapons, the militia appeared to have held back some of its military equipment in the relatively dense urban area.