Dates differ between historians: 16 January (Ménargues), 18 January (de Clerck and Malsagne; consistent with Fisk), 19 January (Hanf), 20 or 22 January (Traboulsi). Maslakh, next door, fell at the same time. Most of the district's people were Shi'is, living alongside Palestinians, Kurds and Armenian Lebanese. Haugbolle estimates 150-500 dead, de Clerck and Malsagne 600-1,000; some 30,000 people were driven out to West Beirut and the southern suburbs.

Barely a tenth of American and British residents accepted the evacuation, Fisk writes. The British went by road, the PLO escorting them through West Beirut and a Libyan officer on to the Syrian lines; a day later a US landing craft took evacuees off from a PLO-guarded bathing club on the Corniche.

De Clerck and Malsagne have Iranian clerics and activists settling in the Bekaa, and then in Tyre, from 1980, before 500 to 2,000 Revolutionary Guards entered Lebanon in June 1982.

Bashir Gemayel, back from Saudi Arabia on 2 July, said the PLO did not mean to leave. Two hours earlier, at the Alexandre Hotel, Sharon had told reporters, Robert Fisk among them, that Israel's only aim was to destroy the PLO and it wanted not 'one square inch' of Lebanon.

The massacre lasted from the evening of Thursday 16 September to the morning of Saturday 18 September (Traboulsi gives 15-17, Hanf 17-18). The killers were militiamen of the Lebanese Forces' security service under Elie Hobeika, together with men of Saad Haddad's South Lebanon militia. The Israeli army, which controlled the area after entering West Beirut on 15 September, let them into the camps, lit the camps with flares at night and watched from command posts nearby. Israel's Kahan Commission, published on 7 February 1983, held the Phalangists directly responsible and found Defence Minister Ariel Sharon personally responsible, recommending his removal; it also attributed indirect responsibility to other Israeli political and military leaders. Estimates of the dead range from about 460-800 to 3,500; Bayan Nuwayhed al-Hout's survey found victims of twelve nationalities, about half Palestinian and more than a quarter Lebanese.

On 29 January the Druze resumed attacking the army at Souk al-Gharb, after Shi'i militia sniping at the army and French troops from mid-January, Hanf's next escalation.

Hanf writes that Kerr was murdered by unknown assailants; Fisk says he was shot in the head by 'Islamic Jihad' on campus. De Clerck and Malsagne give 18 January 1984 in one chapter but list the murder among the reverses of 1983 in another. The wording 'killing attempt' understates it: Kerr was killed.

The meetings produced no agreement (Hanf).

He was shot in the head 25 m from the ambassador's office, a day after the rue de Rennes attack in Paris (7 dead, 55 wounded).

Historians describe the collapse of real wages behind such decrees: against 1974, the statutory minimum wage kept 13 percent of its buying power at the end of 1986 (Hanf, after Abou Rjaily and Labaki).

Hanf (pp. 569-570): the joint US-Syrian proposal came out of three days of talks in Damascus from 15 September, after which Murphy warned the Maronite Patriarch that the alternative to Daher was chaos.