MONROVIA, Liberia ? Shells and rockets pounded refugee-crowded neighborhoods of Liberia’s capital Wednesday as rebels pressed home their three-year war to oust President Charles Taylor, wounding hundreds and leaving thousands of others cowering in the coastal city without escape.

The fighting shattered a week-old truce and raised the possibility of the deadliest of endgames for Liberia’s civil war: an all-out battle among undisciplined armies for the city of 1 million residents, now also packed with hundreds of thousands of refugees.

Taylor pledged to live or die with his troops, with rebels on three sides of the city and the Atlantic surf pounding the other.

The U.S. Embassy opened the gates of its residential compound to Liberians seeking shelter, and thousands of them crowded in Wednesday hoping proximity to the Americans would mean safety.

Hours later, three pieces of ordnance believed either mortars or rockets landed within the high-walled compound and exploded, sending those taking refuge there running. Survivors rushed out bleeding victims, some missing limbs using a wheelbarrow and bloodstained shirts as stretchers.

There were no reported injuries to Americans, the last of whom had recently been moved out of the residential complex to the heavily guarded U.S. Embassy across the street.

“Everybody in the world is sitting to watch us die,” a refugee, Suah Kolli, cried at Monrovia’s John F. Kennedy hospital, where 200 wounded brought in by noon overflowed the hospital’s wards and lay sprawled, moaning and bleeding, in slippery hallways.

People flee from an explosion at the U.S. Embassy diplomatic complex in the Liberian capital, Monrovia. Explosives landed Wednesday within the U.S. diplomatic residential complex, detonating among thousands of terrified Liberians crowded into the compound to escape fighting which is engulfing the city.

The French humanitarian group Medecins Sans Frontiers evacuated another hospital overrun by fighting, and by noon was treating scores of wounded in its own compound.

Refugees packed schoolyards, shell-gutted houses and the country’s lead soccer stadium, while many of Monrovia’s people simply cowered in their homes. Aid workers described a humanitarian nightmare even before fighting broke Tuesday, with cholera and starvation rampant among the crowded refugees.

Taylor’s forces have lost at least 60 percent of the country to two rebel groups each determined to drive out the president, a U.N.-indicted war-crimes suspect accused of roiling West Africa’s conflicts for 14 years.

At midday, Taylor took to the airwaves of his private radio station to dispel a rumor he had fled.

“This blatant act of terror will be fought all the way,” Taylor declared, as artillery boomed.

“My life is no more important than yours,” he said. “I am here with the men and women in arms, encouraging them to fight on. Because my survival is their survival, and their survival is mine.”