The shelling hit a building which was previously being used to treat the wounded from the fighting in Misrata, the resident said.

Patients and medical staff had been transferred to another location a few days ago.

"We have one confirmed dead and we don't know how many wounded.

The ambulances are arriving now bringing the wounded," said the resident, who was speaking by telephone from the building now being used as a makeshift hospital.

A man who gave his name as Ayman and said he was a doctor in Misrata told Britain's BBC radio by telephone the building had been hit with two mortar shells.

"We have one killed, three in the operating room now, one with an amputated leg, we have one in ICU because of shell fragments in his chest and we have six wounded with different wounds and they are waiting for an operation but we have only three operating rooms," he said.

Misrata, Libya's third-biggest city, is the last big rebel stronghold left in the west of the country.

It has been encircled and under attack for weeks.

A doctor in the city told Reuters on Saturday that 160 people, most of them civilians, had been killed in the fighting there in the past seven days.

Accounts from Misrata cannot be independently verified because Libyan authorities are not allowing journalists to report freely from the city, which is about 200 km (130 miles) east of Tripoli.