Rebels were also battling to restore basic services in Tripoli, hit by cuts in the supply of water, electricity, petrol and even food following the fierce clashes of the past week.
The leader of the rebels' National Transitional Council (NTC), Mustafa Abdel Jalil urged in Doha Monday no let-up in international action against Qadhafi.
"Qadhafi's defiance of the coalition forces still poses a danger, not only for Libya but for the world. That is why we are calling for the coalition to continue its support," Abdel Jalil said at a meeting of chiefs of staff of countries militarily involved in Libya, including Qatar.
Another senior rebel leader, Jallal al-Digheily -- who holds the NTC's defence portfolio -- told the meeting that coalition support was needed to eliminate the last pockets of resistance by Qadhafi's loyalist troops.
"We still need the support (of the coalition) to re-establish security and eliminate the sleeper cells and the remainder of Qadhafi's regime," Digheily said.
The international coalition launched Operation Unified Protector in Libya on March 19 under a UN mandate which authorised air strikes to protect civilians in the country's civil war which began with a peaceful revolt in mid-February.
Since March 31, the air strikes have been carried out under the command of NATO.
Although Qadhafi's whereabouts remain a mystery, there is widespread speculation that he is holed up in Sirte, 360 kilometres (225 miles) east of Tripoli, among tribal supporters there.
Rebel forces moved to within 30 kilometres (18 miles) of Sirte from the west and captured Bin Jawad 100 kilometres to the east, the rebel commander in Misrata, Mohammed al-Fortiya, told AFP on Sunday.
"We took Bin Jawad today" on the eastern front, and "the thwar (rebel fighters) from Misrata are 30 kilometres from Sirte" in the west, Fortiya said.
Fierce fighting also raged in the west of Libya as rebels trying to wrest control of the region from Qadhafi's forces said they had fallen into an ambush in a town southwest of Zuwarah.
"We are negotiating with the tribes for Sirte's peaceful surrender," Fortiya said, adding that only tribal leaders were involved, and that to his knowledge no direct contact had been made with Qadhafi himself.
The rebels have offered a $1.7 million-dollar reward for Qadhafi's capture, dead or alive.
Sirte has been targeted by NATO warplanes, which on Friday and Saturday destroyed more than 50 military vehicles, two military shelters, a military observation point and a military engineer asset.
The air assault continued on Sunday, with NATO in its latest operational update saying four radars, 20 surface to air missile canisters, three military support vehicles and two surface to air missile systems were hit.
Some 70 percent of homes in central Tripoli have no running water because of damage to the network, but potable water is being distributed from mosques, NTC officials said.
Abed al-Obeidi, deputy chief of the transitional council in Tripoli, said the water problem was because of technical faults, denying that sabotage by Qadhafi's forces was to blame.
Meanwhile, the only man convicted for the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jet which killed 270 people when it blew up over the Scottish town of Lockerbie is drifting in and out of a coma, his brother said on Monday.
Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi, who has terminal cancer, "is in and out of a coma," his brother Abdel Nasser told reporters outside the family home in a posh residential tree-lined street of the Libyan capital.
"His medicine was looted but he has new supplies now," said Abdel Nasser, who came out to speak to journalists who had massed outside the family home in the Dimashq neighbourhood.
Advocacy group Human Rights Watch said Monday that evidence indicates that forces led by one of Qadhafi's sons massacred dozens of detainees, after AFP had counted at least 50 human skulls in a makeshift jail.
HRW said in a statement that it had inspected about 45 skeletons and two other bodies at the makeshift prison in Salaheddin.
"Sadly this is not the first gruesome report of what appears to be the summary execution of detainees in the final days of the Qadhafi government's control of Tripoli," Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW's Middle East and north Africa director, said in a statement.
An AFP correspondent on Saturday counted at least 50 skulls in the ashes at the facility next to a base of the feared Khamis Qadhafi's 32 Brigade in Salaheddin, a suburb just south of Tripoli.
Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2011