it s a city, though, where no one is willing to say anything against him, raise a hand against him. and the regime particularly seems intent on gadhafi s vision of fighting to the end, anderson. arwa, thank you. nic robertson as well, stay staff. chris lawrence, as well. let us know what you think on facebook or twitter. did france essentially go it alone when they dropped the first bombs on libya back on saturday? new details coming out about that emergency meeting in paris last weekend. plus, the wrangling going on between the coalition countries about who exactly is in charge of this mission and if the arab league is going to play any part at all. and the health ministry in japan finding radiation exceeding legal limits in 11 different types of vegetables. the fda here in the united states is banning certain foods from certain parts of japan. we have details on that ahead.
seen a response by heavy gunfire and there will be a reason behind it. but i doubt that we re seeing a change i doubt we re seeing the army decide they re not going to respond. very likely an order would have come down not to fire, either not to scare the residents of the city or not to give away weapon positions because perhaps they had been moved. right, and that s going to be an interesting point. speaking of things that and where they are, can you put us in the frame? there are going to be a lot of people out there in the world that don t know the geography of tripoli too well. they ll need to understand from where you could hear these loud explosions. were these communal areas, were they residential areas, what exactly? reporter: very, very hard to say, to be perfectly honest where these explosions might have been.
nic, first, we ve been looking at what s happening in misurata. word of coalition air strikes against positions, gadhafi positions. what is the significance for gadhafi forces in trying to retake or control misurata? reporter: i think what gadhafi is trying to do is to make sure however far his pushback from the east, and he doesn t want to be pushed back any further than the next city after benghazi, in fact where rebels, opposition and government forces reported being engaged in fights. he doesn t want any rebel control further west of there across the rest of the country, which is a large swath of the rest of the country. so i get the impression he s trying to finish off the rebel opposition inside misurata before the coalition can position itself and defend the civilians of that city, as is called for in the u.n. resolution.
gadhafi s attack on the city of benghazi this saturday. those attacks were possibly the final straw that prompted french fighter jets to strike when they did. we cannot independently confirm the authenticity of this video. this video claims to be from inside misurata, one of the cities said to still be under fire from gadhafi forces. and the breaking news we just heard allied air strikes are going on. chris lawrence has more on that in a moment. new video of shelling yesterday in the middle of the town, that s what you re listening to.
an enormous toll on civilians from allied air strikes. they took reporters to a military site that had been targeted with no sign of loss of life. more of that dog and pony show in just a minute. misurata, though, is where civilians have been targeted by gadhafi forces. numerous eyewitnesss have reported shelling, also snipers. new air strikes reported near the city tonight by coalition forces against gadhafi positions. first, here s one person we talked too earlier today in the city. again, as always, we have to caution, we cannot independently verify what this person is saying. we can hear explosions and tanks and bombing in the center of the city. there are tanks and lots of snipers. there are more than 50 snipers on the roof tops of the city. and the tanks are attacking the