MOGADISHU, Somalia — A missile slammed through the roof of a children's hospital yesterday that was packed with civilians wounded in fighting between Islamic insurgents and Ethiopian troops allied to the government, an official said.The shell exploded in a ward housing between 20 and 30 wounded adults, said Wilhelm Huber, regional director for the SOS Children's Villages. The children had been evacuated earlier because shells were hitting the compound, Huber said.

Huber said five missiles hit the grounds in the lunchtime attack but only one hit a ward. People were injured but he did not have details due to the chaotic situation and because wounded people were already in the ward.

"What is happening now cannot go on," he told The Associated Press from Nairobi, Kenya where he is based. He said he did not believe the hospital had been deliberately targeted, but that it clearly came from government forces because of the direction of the missiles.

"People are desperate," Huber said. "This is a tragic situation."

At least 13 shells have hit the grounds of the hospital and children's orphanage in the last six days including this latest attack, he said.

Somali government officials were not immediately available for comment.

Meanwhile analysts said yesterday that US and Ethiopian military intervention in Somalia has destroyed a fragile stability in this battle-scarred nation, as more than a week of unrelenting violence trapped desperate civilians in their homes with gunfire and artillery shells raining down outside.

The leaders of an Islamic movement that was driven from power in December by the government and its Ethiopian backers were still active and popular support for the group is unlikely to melt away, according to a report by British-based international affairs think-tank Chatham House.

The Council of Islamic Courts ruled much of southern Somalia for six relatively peaceful months in 2006 before being ousted by Somali troops and their Ethiopian allies, along with US special forces. Radicals in the council rejected a secular government and have been accused of having ties to al-Qaida.

Chatham House's assessment came as Ethiopian tanks and artillery continued to pound insurgent strongholds in the wrecked capital, Mogadishu, even as peace talks were under way between Ethiopian military officials and elders of Mogadishu's dominant clan to try and silence the guns.

"Whatever the short term future holds, the complex social forces behind the rise of the Islamic Courts will not go away," said Chatham House writers Cedric Barnes and Huran Hassan.

Rights groups say more than 350 people have been killed in eight straight days of fighting despite UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon calling on warring sides to end the violence and allow humanitarian assistance to reach the needy. The Somali government and its Ethiopian allies are trying to quash a growing Islamic insurgency that sprang from the collapse of the Islamic movement but civilians are getting caught in the crossfire.

Late Tuesday, an extremist group claimed responsibility for car bomb attacks earlier in the day against Ethiopian troops and a hotel housing lawmakers loyal to Somalia's interim government. Known as the Young Mujahedeen Movement, the group is part of the Shabab, whose leader Aden Hashi Ayro was recently chosen to head Somalia's al-Qaida cell and was one of the people targeted by a US airstrike in Somalia in January.

The UN says more than 340,000 of Mogadishu's two million residents have fled since February, sending streams of people into squalid camps with little to eat, no shelter and disease spreading. The war-ravaged country is suffering its worst humanitarian crisis in its recent history, according to the UN.

The last bid to wipe out the insurgency in late March left more than a 1,000 dead, said local rights groups and traditional elders.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said late Tuesday that he believed the exodus and the death toll had been exaggerated.

"I have been stuck inside for the last three days and have no food left," mother of nine, Hawa Mualim told The Associated Press by telephone, saying there was fighting outside her house in northern Mogadishu and she was too scared to venture outside.

Western and UN diplomats fear Somalia's government is holding up vital aid supplies to people fleeing fighting. The government has been demanding to inspect all food and medical shipments, holding up potentially lifesaving aid, European and American officials warned in letters obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.

UN humanitarian chief John Holmes said representatives of his office and other UN agencies met in the southern town of Baidoa on Monday and received assurances aid would get through.

Somalia has not had an effective national government since 1991, when warlords overthrew dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and then turned on one another, throwing the country into anarchy. The current administration was formed in 2004 but has struggled to extend its control over the country.