The daughter, Aisha, pumped her right fist as she led the audience in late-night chants from the second-floor balcony of the badly damaged Bab Aziziyah compound, targeted by U.S. warplanes in 1986. "Leave our skies with your bombs," she said, referring to NATO airstrikes that had struck Tripoli just hours earlier.
"Talk about Gadhafi stepping down is an insult to all Libyans because Gadhafi is not in Libya, but in the hearts of all Libyans," she added.
Gadhafi, in power for 42 years, has been testing the international community's resolve on the battle field. On Thursday, his forces shelled the besieged western Libyan town of Misrata, where rebels are clinging to positions near the port area, their only link to the outside world.
The Libyan leader has a long and troubled history with the West. In the 1980s, he was seen as sponsor of militant groups, and Libya's secret service was held responsible for the April 5, 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco that killed two U.S. servicemen. Ten days later, U.S. warplanes struck targets in Benghazi and Tripoli, including Gadhafi's Bab Aziziyah compound. Dozens were killed in the strikes. Gadhafi never repaired Bab Aziziyah, instead turning it into a museum.
Hundreds rallied there late Thursday and early Friday, chanting pro-Gadhafi slogans, such as "Only Allah, Moammar and Libya," and "The people want Moammar as their leader."
The crowd erupted in cheers when Aisha appeared on the balcony.
"Let me go back to the past when I was a child, when I was nine years old, in this house," she said. "A rain of missiles and bombs. They tried to kill me. They killed dozens of children in Libya."
"Now, after 25 years, the same missiles, the same bombs, rain on our children's heads," she said.
"We are a people that cannot be defeated," she added.
Aisha Gadhafi's defiant showing came as leaders of Britain, France and the United States vowed to keep up their military campaign in Libya until Gadhafi leaves power.
In a strongly worded, jointly written article published in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, British Prime Minister David Cameron, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and U.S. President Barack Obama said on Friday that leaving Gadhafi in power would be an "unconscionable betrayal" of the Libyan people.
"It is unthinkable that someone who has tried to massacre his own people can play a part in their future government," the leaders wrote.
"So long as Gadhafi is in power, NATO and its coalition partners must maintain their operations so that civilians remain protected and the pressure on the regime builds," they said.
"Then a genuine transition from dictatorship to an inclusive constitutional process can really begin, led by a new generation of leaders. For that transition to succeed, Colonel Gadhafi must go, and go for good."
France and Britain want to extend airstrikes to the logistics and decision-making centers of Gadhafi's army, rather than start arming Libyan rebels, French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet said.
The article by the Western allies appeared at a time when diplomatic efforts have failed to paper over divisions between NATO allies about how intensively they should prosecute the three-week-old air war, and the situation on the ground has shown signs of stalemate.
Meanwhile, rebels said a hail of rockets fired by besieging forces into a residential district of Misrata, Libya's third-largest city, had killed 23 civilians, mostly women and children.
"Over 200 Grad missiles fell on the port area, including residential neighborhoods near the port. They shelled this area because the port is Misrata's only window to the outside world," a rebel spokesman told Reuters the name Ghassan said by telephone.
"The destruction there was huge. I was there and saw for myself," he said, adding that the port had been shut.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
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