Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Jim Muir: "There are thousands upon thousands of people waiting desperately to cross that border" 
 
 The UN has called for a mass humanitarian evacuation of people fleeing Libya for Tunisia, saying the border situation is at "crisis point". 
 
 Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said thousands of lives were at stake. Some 75,000 people have fled to Tunisia since unrest began and 40,000 more are waiting to cross, the UN says. 
 
 The organisation has voted to suspend Libya from its Human Rights Council. 
 
 Beleaguered Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi has rejected calls to leave. 
 
 He has played down the unrest in the country and is trying to regain areas held by opponents of his rule in the west. The protesters have control of major towns in the east. 
 
 Mr Ban said reports had suggested about 1,000 people had so far died in the Libyan unrest. 
 
 Meanwhile there has a series of huge explosions in the capital Tripoli, caused by a fuel tanker which overturned. It is not clear if the incident was caused by an act of sabotage. 
 
 And pro-Gaddafi forces have taken the eastern town of al-Brayqa, reports the BBC's Nick Springate in nearby Ajdabiya. 
 
 Our correspondent says opposition forces are moving to engage with Gaddafi loyalists near Ajdabiya itself. 
 
 'Strong message' 
 
 The UN High Commissioner for Refugees said it was urgently appealing, along with the International Organisation for Migration, for governments to engage in "a massive humanitarian evacuation of tens of thousands of Egyptians and other third country nationals". 
 
 Vietnamese, Indians, Turks, Tunisians, Chinese and Thai workers are among those stranded. 
 
 At the scene The massive influx has caused strains for Tunisia, a country which has been going through its own convulsions and where thousands of jobless young men have been trying to flee to Europe. There have been angry demonstrations at the border by local Tunisian youths denouncing the flood of Egyptian migrants in particular. Tunisian army forces have intervened to impose control and allow the flow to continue. They also fired in the air to disperse local Tunisian smugglers who wanted to take money from the Egyptians on promises of smuggling them home on boats. 
 
 The groups called for governments to supply "massive financial and logistical assets... including planes, boats and expert personnel". 
 
 "The two organisations deem this operation essential as the overcrowding at the border worsens by the hour," they said. 
 
 More than 75,000 people have crossed the Tunisian border since 19 February, most of them Egyptians, with 70,000 more leaving Libya via the Egyptian border. 
 
 On Tuesday Tunisian guards fired into the air to try to control the crowds. 
 
 Mr Ban said: "We need concrete action on the ground to provide humanitarian and medical assistance. Time is the essence. Thousands of lives are at stake." 
 
 He said the initial priority was food, water, sanitation and shelter followed by renewed efforts to return the evacuees home. 
 
 Antonio Guterres, head of the UN refugee agency, told the BBC: "We need a massive evacuation because we are witnessing now a huge humanitarian disaster." 
 
 World Food Programme executive director Josette Sheeran told the BBC food was being brought in by road and air, and bought locally, but supplies were under "deep stress". 
 
 The BBC's Jim Muir, at the border, says thousands of people are waiting desperately to cross. Some are being crushed in the crowds; many in a state of complete exhaustion. 
 
 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The UN's Antonio Guterres warns of a humanitarian disaster in Libya 
 
 In voting to suspend Libya from the UN Human Rights Council, the resolution - passed by consensus by the UN membership - accused Libya of committing gross and systematic violations of human rights. 
 
 Mr Ban said: "These UN actions send a strong and important message - a message of great consequence within the region and beyond - that there is no impunity, that those who commit crimes against humanity will be punished, that fundamental principles of justice and accountability shall prevail." 
 
 The US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, said: "People who turn their guns on their own people have no place on the Human Rights Council." 
 
 The BBC's Barbara Plett at the UN says this resolution seals Col Gaddafi's isolation as it is the body that represents all member states - the one where Libya might have expected to have some support and it has none. 
 
 No-fly zone debate 
 
 However, our UN correspondent says there appears to be little appetite for a resolution imposing a no-fly zone over Libya, a move the UK in particular has been investigating. 
 
 US Defence Secretary Robert Gates warned that any military action over Libya, such as setting up a no-fly zone, must be carefully considered because of the potential consequences. 
 
 "We also have to think about, frankly, the use of the US military in another country in the Middle East," Mr Gates said, referring to the long US-led war in Iraq. 
 
 "So I think we're sensitive about all of these things, but we will provide the president with a full range of options," he said. 
 
 UK Foreign Secretary William Hague said the action could still be taken as "there have been occasions in the past when such a no-fly zone has had clear, legal, international justification even without a Security Council resolution". 
 
 However, there are few signs of consensus. French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said there would be no no-fly zone without a UN resolution, while Russia has described a no-fly zone as "superfluous". 
 
 Protesters fear the Libyan air force could launch attacks to try to oust them from the towns they have won. 
 
 Although the opposition is fairly secure in the east, pro-Gaddafi forces are said to be circling a number of towns held by protesters in the west, including Zawiya, Nalut and Zintan. 
 
 Attacks on protesters in Zawiya, Zintan and Misrata, east of Tripoli, were repelled overnight on Monday. 
 
 In other developments: 
 
 The European Union is calling an extraordinary summit for 11 March to discuss the situation in Libya and unrest in other parts of North Africa and the Middle East 
 
 US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in testimony to the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, urged lawmakers not to cut funds on dealing with overseas crises. She said Libya "could become a peaceful democracy or it could face protracted civil war" 
 
 In an interview with BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen, US TV network ABC and the UK's Sunday Times newspaper on Monday, Col Gaddafi laughed at suggestions he would leave Libya. 
 
 He said true Libyans had not demonstrated against him and that his forces had not fired on protesters. ||||| TATAOUINE, Tunisia — A century ago, fleeing Italian colonizers, the inhabitants of Libya ’s remote western mountains descended upon this wind-whipped Tunisian outpost, many to stay permanently. 
 
 With those desert plateaus once again under siege, this time by the armies of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, about 30,000 Libyans have repeated their ancestors’ flight. Astonishingly, to aid workers, hundreds upon hundreds of Tunisians, some of them the descendants of those earlier refugees, have opened their homes to these Libyan families since early April, when Colonel Qaddafi’s forces went on the attack. 
 
 There are no sprawling refugee camps at the border, just two modest clusters of tents housing around 2,500 people. The vast majority of the newcomers are now living with Tunisian families here and in neighboring villages, an area that in normal times counts just 150,000 residents. 
 
 “It’s the first time I’ve seen such an impressive response,” said Firas Kayal, a spokesman in Tunisia for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. That generosity is all the more remarkable, he added, given the challenges Tunisia faces in the wake of its own revolution — which in January ended 23 years of kleptocratic rule by President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali — and previous waves of Libyan refugees this year in the north. 
 
 Even some of the refugees seem baffled by it. 
 
 “Would you give your house to someone you didn’t know, from another country?” asked Maren Abouzakhar, 22, who fled the besieged Libyan city of Yafran early this month. She spoke in the airy drawing room of the house she and 10 relatives now shared with a local family; the owner had moved himself, his wife and their three children into the unfinished ground floor, leaving the comfortable, perfumed second story for their guests. 
 
 “We don’t even know how to thank them for something like this,” Ms. Abouzakhar said. 
 
 Abdallah Awaye, 35, a thin, sun-darkened man and the owner of the house, described his gesture as a matter of obligation and pride. “This is how it is, these are our customs,” he said. “If there is something to eat, we will eat it together. If there is nothing to eat, we will have nothing together.” 
 
 Most of the refugees arrived at the border with little more than the clothes on their backs and fears for the sons they left behind to fight the Qaddafi militias, and were rapidly taken in by local residents whose compassion and good cheer have drawn the admiration of Libyans and international aid workers alike. 
 
 Mr. Kayal also praised the generosity of the Tunisian government, which has kept the country’s borders open from the start of the Libyan conflict. As many 276,000 people — most of them foreign workers — have fled Libya for Tunisia, according to United Nations estimates. 
 
 Asked about their willingness to provide shelter to strangers, residents of Tataouine like to cite an apt local proverb: Travelers cry upon arriving in this desolate place, but leave with tears in their eyes. 
 
 Despite the abundance of good intentions, though, the city and surrounding areas are feeling the strain of so many refugees. The afterglow of January’s jubilant revolution has largely given way to old frustrations, with people complaining of a stagnant economy, inadequate infrastructure and widespread unemployment. 
 
 The police, the lackeys of the deposed government, are largely absent from the streets, having gone into hiding after the revolution. And many worry that the country’s transitional government has failed to break with what they call decades of neglect for the arid Tunisian south. 
 
 “Generosity and fraternity have been taking precedence over the problems,” said Ali Mourou, the mayor of Tataouine. 
 
 Nevertheless, he said, in response to appeals from the city, truckloads of aid have flowed in from as far as Tunis, the capital, 300 miles to the north. 
 
 Three local coordinating centers have been opened, placing Libyan families in homes and distributing donated couscous, macaroni, milk and tomatoes, as well as mattresses and blankets. Libyan children have been placed in local schools, and doctors and nurses have opened a clinic offering free medical care. 
 
 “We’ve taken the thing as a human obligation, a religious obligation, an obligation of fraternity,” Mr. Mourou said, and the Libyans have been “truly appreciative.” 
 
 He added, “They ought to be.” 
 
 He worries, though.
– Tunisia was not pleased today when a battle between Libya’s warring factions spilled across the border today, after Moammar Gadhafi’s forces attacked a rebel-held frontier crossing. The incursion was brief and limited, and Gadhafi’s forces even apologized locally, Reuters reports. But Tunisia’s foreign ministry still issued a statement expressing “extreme indignation” and demanding “measures to put an immediate stop to these violations.” But Tunisia has proven remarkably welcoming to Libyans who aren’t fighting. Some 30,000 refugees have fled there, and the vast majority of them have been welcomed into the homes of Tunisians, the New York Times reports. Only about 2,500 have had to settle in the relatively small refugee camp at the border. “It’s the first time I’ve seen such an impressive response,” says a spokesman for the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees.