BENGHAZI, LIBYA—Forces loyal to Moammar Gadhafi punched hard into the last line of defence protecting the rebel capital of Benghazi Tuesday, putting the shrinking revolution at risk of collapse as hope for international intervention wanes.

As another day of UN deliberations ended in discord, the Libyan regime ringed the strategic city of Ajdabiya from two sides, launching volleys of rocket fire from air and ground-based artillery and triggering an exodus or fighters and civilians north on the 200-kilometre highway to Benghazi.

Libyan state TV declared Ajdabiya “cleansed of mercenaries and terrorists.” Rebel officials in Benghazi later disputed the claim, insisting a rebel counter-attack had retaken the city 100,000.

The rebels also claimed a string of victories elsewhere using the first-ever deployment of at least two aging jetfighters brought to the rebel side by defecting Libyan pilots, including the sinking of three Gadhafi warships and an air strike on a military base at Gadhafi’s home town of Sirte. But the claims could not be independently verified and come after days of rebel assessments on the fighting that did not match journalists’ observations on the ground.

All impartial evidence points to Gadhafi’s forces continuing the push eastward deep into rebel territory, at the expense of the severely outgunned rebel army.

Supporters of a no-fly zone introduced a UN resolution Tuesday aimed at stopping Gadhafi’s planes from bombing civilians, but Russia and Germany expressing misgivings. At a G8 meeting earlier in the day, France and Britain failed to win support for a no-fly zone.

With no significant progress on grinding foreign diplomacy aimed at stemming the Gadhafi surge, the rebel leadership is now grappling with the prospects that any outside help will amount to too little, too late.

“It’s unbelievable what is happening at the international level,” Iman Boughaigis, spokeswoman for the nascent Libyan Transitional Council, told the Toronto Star.

“We mounted this fight to live under the values of the West — freedom, human rights and human dignity. And now we are alone.

“But we will stand here in Benghazi to the end. We will live in dignity or we will die.”

The Gadhafi brigades now appear in partial control, at least, of the crucial Ajdabiya crossroads, where one desolate desert highway stretches 400 km to the rebel-held city of Tobruk and the eastern border with Egypt and another runs north to Benghazi.

A siege of one of both cities now seems likely. And if Gadhafi loyalists break beyond Ajdabiya, there appears a largely unimpeded route to the border itself, which has been unguarded since the uprising erupted one month ago.

For days, as the poorly armed rebel fighters retreated hundreds of kilometres in the face of the regime’s overwhelming air and groundfire, the hard kernel of the revolt in Benghazi vowed a fight to the death rather than cede their newfound freedom to Gadhafi.

The fate of these people, many thousands of whom have gone public, sharing for the first time the deprivations of the past 42 years, appears dangerously near to being left to the mercy of a regime that routinely describes them as “rats and vermin.”

Some activists wept openly Tuesday at the waterfront courthouse that has served as headquarters of the homegrown revolution. Others described in bitter terms the disappointment of their unanswered pleas for foreign intervention.

And others still wondered at the message Gadhafi’s apparent rout sends to other autocrats in the region facing popular, freedom-seeking uprisings. None of the revolts that have ricocheted around Arab world have drawn anywhere near the blood of Libya, where minimal estimates placed the death toll at well over 1,000, many of them unarmed civilians.

“If this was happening to a western country — Italy, Germany or Spain — how long world the world wait to act? One day, one week?” Dr. Abdul Atif Aghwal, chairman of Benghazi’s Jamahiriya Hospital, told the Toronto Star.

“Here, we wait one month and nothing happens. Gadhafi is a megalomaniac, his mind has snapped, and he will only kill more until he is stopped.”

Many western journalists who have made home in Benghazi since the uprising erupted were packing bags and readying for an overnight run for the Egyptian border. Others among the handful of foreign nationals left in Benghazi were looking to their governments for a possible final evacuation by sea.

Gadhafi promised on Monday he would not kill activists involved in the uprising, should they be trapped and ultimately captured in Benghazi. But a translation of a regime leaflet dropped by air over Ajdabiya suggests retribution may be in the cards.

“It is the hour we face the betrayers. House by house, street by street, one by one, person by person, we will hunt the rats,” the leaflet said. “Huge numbers of armed people are coming to protect you, so join us. Do not hesitate to execute the betrayers and the rats.”

Any assault on the well-armed rebels Benghazi itself raises the spectre of urban warfare of a ferocity unseen this past month, with the potential for long weeks of battles and a high civilian death toll.

“The amount of guns in Benghazi, the number of RPGs in private homes, is enormous,” another rebel spokesman, Mustafa Gheriani, said Tuesday night. “If it should come to that, this city will fight with everything it has.”

The Gadhafi surge into Ajdabiya came after two days of air attacks, a morning of artillery shelling and what appeared to be a short-lived counterattack Monday, when some rebel fighters managed to push back to the oil port of Brega, 80 km west.

Word of the rebel counterstrike emboldened some civilians to attempt to drive back to their homes along the desert road between the two towns. But the civilian convoy reportedly was subjected to a withering attack by Gadhafi forces, with several cars and their occupants destroyed, according a German media crew that witnessed the ambush.

The German journalists also were hit in the attack and said their Libyan driver was killed by gunfire. They claimed to have fled on foot, moving eastward for seven hours late Monday before flagging down a rebel car and making their way back to relative safety in Benghazi.