A/HRC/19/68 81. Qadhafi forces launched sustained shelling on many towns and cities across Libya during the conflict. Some of these towns, such as Misrata, were still occupied by civilians. The use of unguided weapons in such cases constituted an indiscriminate attack. While the attacks damaged and destroyed some apparently civilian objects, such as mosques, the thuwar used individual buildings for military purposes, thus voiding their protected status. 82. A similar principle applied to the attack by the thuwar on Sirte. The scale of the destruction there and the nature of the weaponry employed indicated that the attacks were indiscriminate. H. North Atlantic Treaty Organization16 1. Introduction 83. On 17 March 2011, the Security Council adopted resolution 1973 (2011), in which it authorized “all necessary measures” to “protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya”, while excluding a “foreign occupation force”. On 19 March, military forces from France, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America began attacks. On 31 March, NATO assumed command of all offensive operations. 2. Findings 84. NATO aircraft flew a total of 17,939 armed sorties in Libya, employing exclusively precision guided munitions. NATO representatives informed the Commission that it had a standard of “zero expectation” of death or injury to civilians, and that no targets had been struck if there was any reason to believe that civilians would be injured or killed. The Commission was furthermore informed that the majority of munitions employed had delayed fusing to minimize collateral effects, and that NATO had also employed the minimum-sized munitions necessary to achieve the objective. NATO also warned the population by means of leaflets and radio broadcasts. 85. The Commission took into account the claims made by the Qadhafi Government with regard to civilian casualties, but subsequent testimony from former regime members and others, as well as its own interviews at the sites, confirmed that the Government had deliberately misstated the extent of civilian casualties. In one case, the Commission received a credible report of Libyan forces moving the bodies of children from a hospital morgue and taking them to the site of a NATO airstrike. 86. Despite the precautions taken by NATO as described above, the Commission noted incidents of civilian deaths and of damage to civilian infrastructure. Of the 20 NATO airstrikes investigated, the Commission documented five airstrikes where a total of 60 civilians had been killed and 55 injured. The Commission also investigated two NATO airstrikes that damaged civilian infrastructure and where no military target could be identified. 87. The single largest case of civilian casualties from a NATO airstrike in Libya was witnessed on 8 August 2011 in the town of Majer, where the Commission found that NATO bombs had killed 34 civilians and injured 38. After the initial airstrike killed 16 people, a group of rescuers arrived and was hit by a subsequent attack, killing 18. 88. Of the five targets where the Commission identified civilian casualties, four were termed command and control (C2) nodes or troop staging areas by NATO. The 16 16 See A/HRC/19/CRP.1, chap. III, sect. H.