This case brief argues that the Sabra and Shatila massacre is a controversy complicating conventional notions of responsibility, demanding that scholarship move beyond a binary conception where responsibility is either found or absent. I proceed first by contextualising the massacre. Second, by examining how and why responsibility for the massacre was differently attributed. Finally, by evaluating these attributions alongside existing scholarship, such as Young’s ‘liability model’ and discussions on new, dirty, and proxy-warfare. While Young, Erskine, and Kaldor each offer partial insights into diffuse responsibility, none synthesise a framework capable of explaining responsibility. 

Sabra and Shatila demonstrate how the liability model fails when confronted with conditions of proxy facilitation and strategic blurring of accountability. Young’s liability model requires a direct relationship between the action of an identifiable person or group and a harm, which must be voluntary and demonstrably causal; ignorance or causal distance problematically absolves one of responsibility (2006, p.116). It fails, exemplified here, because it presupposes linear causality and known actors – conditions fundamentally incompatible with multi-layered proxy-warfare. International Humanitarian Law (IHL) must evolve to consider, at a minimum, occupation and facilitation. It must operationalise the concept of failure in duty to protect as the legal equivalent of facilitation and consider multiple responsible parties for the same event in different manners. Responsibility is layered and contested, evident in the investigations into the massacre – the Kahan Commission and the Macbride Commission – which attribute responsibility differently. How these commissions define responsibility sets precedents for future IHL regarding what a state’s is obligation to prevent and avoid atrocities

Contextualising the Massacre

In 1982, Israel had been building relationships with and funding Lebanese Maronite militias, especially Bashir Gemayel’s Phalangists (Shahid, 2002, p.37). In an agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), the PLO had retreated from Lebanon and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had followed suit, until the assassination of president-elect Gemayel, when they re-invaded (al-Hout, 2004, pp.1-3). The justification was an unsubstantiated claim that 2,500 ‘terrorists’ – referring to the PLO –had remained (al-Hout, 2004, pp.1-3). Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and the IDF decided the Phalangists would enter the camps under the ‘command’ of the IDF, and Chief of Staff General Rafael Eitan stated that the Phalangists would be ‘sent in with their own methods’ whilst the IDF maintained the perimeter (Shahid, 2002, p.38). The militia killed an estimated 3,000 to 3,500 Lebanese and Palestinian refugees and civilians (Shahid, 2002, p.44). 

The massacre occurred within a complex environment that defies straightforward classification of conflict, as criticised by Milanovic and Hadzi-Vidanovic, into binary frameworks of international armed conflict (IAC) and non-international armed conflict (NIAC), with sub-types such as internationalised, mixed, and cross-border conflicts based on the identity of the actors and the nature of their relationship (2012, p.61). It occurred during Lebanon’s civil war (1975–1990) and a proxy war, as the IDF supported the Lebanese Phalangist militia against the PLO. It occurred within an interstate war, since Israel’s 1982 invasion brought it into direct military confrontation with Lebanon. Simultaneously, it was linked to an extra-state conflict, given Israel’s operations against the PLO and later Hezbollah, in Lebanon. The conflict was internationalised, with the  many Western nations, under the United Nations, deploying peacekeeping forces and exerting diplomatic pressure (Heiberg and Holst, 1986). Finally, Israel had a duty as an occupier (al-Hout, 2004). This intertwined conflict structure fractured lines of authority in ways the liability model cannot map.

Investigating the Massacre

Almost immediately after the attacks, international outrage sparked, leading to the commission of investigative reports, led by Sean MacBride (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1983) and Yitzhak Kahan (Israel, 1983 respectively. The divergence between the reports and the lack of clarity from IHL highlights competing responsibility frameworks.

The MacBride Commission considers state responsibility, framing the narrative in the wider context of Israel as an occupying force in Lebanon. It argues that legally, ‘the invasion of Lebanon by Israel is one of the most serious breaches of the international legal order in recent years,’ and that ‘Israeli authorities bear a heavy legal responsibility … for the massacres at Sabra and Chatila’ (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1983, p.130). The report thus focuses on the Israeli duty to protect as an occupier and its ‘heavy’ responsibility through facilitation. It argues that responsibility cannot be examined without considering Israel’s role in creating the context. 

The Kahan Commission, however, considers individual criminal responsibility and argues that only the Phalangists who committed the killings bear ‘direct responsibility’ whereas individual Israeli commanders, such as Sharon and Eitan, were ‘indirectly responsible’ if they actively knew about or did not prevent the attacks (Israel, 1983). It frames the massacre as an isolated incident. Whilst one should not ignore the significance of the report self-assigning ‘indirect responsibility,’ this approach has been criticised since its release (Falk, 1984, p.319) for over-emphasising Israeli moral standing, supporting a narrow framework that overlooked wider factors. 

IHL has various relevant statutes, such as necessitating that an occupier ensures the protection of civilian life (Sassòli, 2004, p.1). It forbids mistreating or murdering civilians (Casey-Maslen and Vestner, 2022). It does not, however, make clear how to assign responsibility for its violation. IHL creates legal obligations but lacks a unified attribution test, thereby removing the authority that could decide which framework is preferred. The International Court of Justice demands the ‘effective control test’ which ‘requires specific instructions to be given by the intervening state to the non-state actor’ over the specific acts that lead to a violation as opposed to ‘overall control test’ used in other processes (Jamil, 2016, p.188). The latter test lays responsibility for all acts under occupation at the feet of the occupier (Milanovic and Vivanovic, 2012, p.34). This inconsistency in attribution tests produces divergent responsibility outcomes for identical facts. IHL, based on the liability model, is not thus coherent nor consistent enough to cope with atrocities such as Sabra and Shatila. 

The reports agree only on direct Phalangist responsibility. This divergence is a core disagreement on what ‘responsibility’ means and in what framework it must be examined and constructed – whether state or individual criminal responsibility must be considered. IHL does not help in this matter. The MacBride Commission treats facilitation as relevant to responsibility; the Kahan Commission treats only direct action as true responsibility and minimises the wider context through focussing on narrow causation as dictated by the liability model. This divergence proves that responsibility is not an accepted or objective condition. To further analyse this, I analyse theory on responsibility, examining how ideas of proxy-warfare, complicity, and layered responsibility can illuminate the complex nature of accountability.

Theoretical Framework 

Sabra and Shatila serve as the paradigmatic case study for the failure of Young’s liability model. Conventional approaches to responsibility consider only a direct causality. It is also evident in the Kahan Commission, where the focus on direct causation exemplifies the inherent failure of Young’s liability model when faced with complex violence in complex warfare. When the direct causality cannot be traced, such as with ambiguous command and structural violence, as is apparent here, the model fails. (Young, 2006, p.115).

The context of Sabra and Shatila undermines the ability to distinguish responsible parties. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon displays characteristics of a ‘dirty war,’ with blurred legal boundaries, ambiguous chains of command, and the strategic use of both direct and indirect force. In such unclear settings, direct causal chains of responsibility are made insufficient, with responsibility increasingly diffused and contested.  

Dirty war tactics during Sabra and Shatila undermine  the attribution of responsibility. These features are not descriptive but functionally explain why responsibility is legally ambiguous. Smith and Roberts lay out key features of dirty wars, including: 

1. No formal declarations of war; 
2. Not being subject to accepted conventions; 
3. No distinction between civilians and combatants; 
4.  Likely occurring within a state (2008, p.382). 

We can apply these conditions to Sabra and Shatila and its context:

1. There was no formal declaration of war when Israel invaded Lebanon; 
2. The massacre broke the 1949 Geneva Convention – the MacBride Commission states that Israel did commit acts of aggression contrary to international humanitarian law (IHL) and the rights of sovereign Lebanon and the Palestinian people (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1983, p.128);
3. No distinctions were made between combatants and civilians – the Israeli Kahan Commission does delineate, but only considers women and children ‘civilians,’ and regardless of the political status or nationality of the men, they were labelled ‘terrorists’ (Falk, 1984, p.321). The report never justifies its use of the term terrorists;
4. This occurred within Israeli occupied territory – the Geneva Convention states that when one state is occupying another, the occupied are ‘protected persons,’ the responsibility of the occupier (Fourth Geneva Convention, 1949, Art.4).

The Kahan Commission’s repeated use of the word ‘terrorist’ to describe any Palestinian or Lebanese man in the camps is not bias, but a dirty war tactic creating a legal and moral blind spot in assigning responsibility. The strategic deployment of the term reclassifies victims into targets, narrowing the scope of the duty to protect under IHL and justifying the use of indiscriminate violence. This label has the direct and known effect of justifying the death, with no due process, of those labelled terrorists – if the label is used indiscriminately, as in the Kahan report, it justifies indiscriminate killing. Language is also used in the Commission to distinguish between the clear direct responsibility of the Phalangists and the ‘not      unequivocal’ indirect responsibility of Israeli commanders, minimising state-level culpability and distracting from responsibility via facilitation or occupation (Israel, 1983). This shows that through fulfilling the criteria of being a dirty war, the responsibility for the attacks is obscured. The choice of language is not bias but an operational mechanic of dirty war. This is also true considering the wider context of ‘new wars,’ (Kaldor, 2013) which this massacre exemplifies, further complicating responsibility. 

These wars, Kaldor argues ‘involve a myriad of transnational connections so that the distinction[s] … are difficult to sustain’ (2013, p. 14). States, militias, and external powers operate simultaneously within shared zones of violence. Authority is fragmented rather than hierarchical,  violence is both local and international, and responsibility is not linear but relational. The Sabra and Shatila massacre occurred within a uniquely complex conflict layered environment – a civil war, a proxy war, an internationalised conflict, and an occupation – that defies straightforward classification, meaning Kaldor’s ‘new war’ concept holds. The multitude of actors obscures responsibility, as responsibility for something that cannot be defined is very difficult to assign.

Responsibility is further diffused by the nature of proxy-warfare, where a state facilitates violence against another group against a common perceived enemy via a local intermediary, thereby allowing the state to maintain a degree of plausible deniability while technically fulfilling its strategic objectives. Here, the distinction between innocent and guilty collapses to reveal a grey-zone of facilitation. For instance, Israel’s perimeter control and night-time illumination for the massacre for the Phalangists (Shahid, 2002, p.38) do not constitute direct orders but materially enable the violence, a form of structural facilitation. Erskine argues that in such circumstances, ‘the opportunity to be self-directive and to act on decisions, like the capacities for action and deliberation themselves, can exist in degrees,’ (2001, p.82). The fact      that responsibility can exist in degrees is one which neither IHL nor the liability model accounts for. However, one might argue that the liability model applies to direct perpetrators and that its expansion risks diluting their responsibility. However, Sabra and Shatila demonstrate that overly narrow attribution obscures enabling structures.  

Erskine argues moral responsibility must only be assigned to an actor capable of knowing the internationally illegal consequences of their actions, (2001, p.81), and therefore would question which actors should have known what the Phalangists would do. This was addressed in the Kahan Commission, and led to individual Israeli officials being labelled ‘indirectly’ responsible (Israel, 1983). The concept is touched upon, but not fully explained, in the Geneva Convention, where the principle of ‘command responsibility,’ places blame on those who did not ‘take measures necessary for the suppression of all acts contrary to … the Convention’ (GC, 1949, Art.146). However, the report itself demonstrates the ‘dirty war’ tactics as described above, known to obscure responsibility, and accepts the unsubstantiated Israeli claim that there were 2,000 PLO fighters in the camp (Falk, 1984, p.323). Furthermore, it suggests that only individuals were ‘indirectly responsible,’ whereas Erskine argues that states themselves can be held responsible (2001, p.72). This is especially true with structural violence, which is not equivalent to individual wrongdoing nor to purposeful state repression, but the sum consequence of many individuals and institutions furthering their own interests and goals at the expense of one group of the population (Young, 2006, p.114). The liability model is here shown to fail. 

These theoretical contributions demonstrate how complex conflict contexts and tactics obscure responsibility. Considering Sabra and Shatila, responsibility cannot be reduced to a single actor or linear chain of command: from the UN peacekeepers who left, to the Lebanese and Israeli governments, to the Phalangists militia and IDF, various actors had various stakes and levels of knowledge in varying conflicts, thus responsibility is dispersed. Those who were responsible for creating the environment allowing the massacre may not be the same as those who committed the act, nor those who facilitated the act. 

‘Dirty war’ tactics fail the requirement of tracing a direct causal relationship, while ‘new’ and ‘proxy’ warfare fail the requirement of identifiable command and voluntary action. The limitations of the liability model demand a fundamental evolution in our philosophical and legal approach to responsibility.

Conclusion 

This massacre, described in the United Nations General Assembly as an ‘act of genocide’ (United Nations General Assembly, 1982), demonstrates that legal attribution of responsibility via the liability model fails. It fails to consider or protect itself from how language is used to justify certain actions, nor how structural violence and multistate actors disrupt responsibility, nor how to even describe simultaneous conflicts. The MacBride and Kahan Commissions illustrate how one event can generate different assessments depending on the framework applied: one grounding responsibility in occupation and facilitation, and the other restricting it to individual perpetrators and facilitators on a tactical micro-level. They exemplify constructed responsibility. 

The literature supports this conclusion. Sabra and Shatila took place in a structurally complex context. The controversy surrounding Sabra and Shatila proves that assigning responsibility is layered and contested on the following levels: the legal, considering direct versus indirect responsibility, the conceptual, considering individual versus systemic responsibility, and contextual, considering isolated incidents versus embedded contexts. The liability model fails to operationalise these dimensions. Recognising this requires a shift from locating blame to analysing how violence is enabled, without which these horrific events struggle to be healed from, understood, or addressed. Sabra and Shatila therefore demonstrate not simply the difficulty of applying the liability mode, but its structural inadequacy in late-modern warfare.

Future research should move beyond theoretical acknowledgement of the complexity of assigning responsibility to operationalising the concepts of facilitation and occupation within International Humanitarian Law and its enforcement. Sabra and Shatila proves that IHL, informed by the theoretical insights of structural violence, must collapse the legal distance between negligence of the duty of the occupier and the crime of facilitation. Multiple layers of responsibility for the same crime must be acknowledged: guilt of the occupier does not negate guilt of the direct perpetrator. Such a legal synthesis, informed by theory on proxy-warfare and evolving conflict tactics, would recognise that creating a permissive environment for extreme evil is functionally equivalent to being a cause – this is facilitation. IHL could move towards a nonbinary conception that allows for responsibility, and subsequently, consequences, in degrees. Further comparative research on civilian massacres such as My Lai or Abu Ghraib would test if the Sabra and Shatila pattern represents an exception or a broader structural phenomenon in late-modern warfare. In conclusion, Sabra and Shatila demonstrate that the liability model is structurally flawed in late-modern warfare.

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