Formed in September 1975 through Syria's foreign minister Abdel Halim Khaddam, the National Dialogue Committee of some twenty leaders debated secularism and ending sectarian quotas; Hanf says it broke up empty-handed.

Parliament used the truce to amend Article 73 of the constitution so that Frangieh's successor could be elected early: on 9 April according to Hanf, 10 April according to Yara El Khoury. The truce had coincided with the arrival on 31 March of the US envoy Dean Brown.

Historians disagree on 1976: Haugbolle ranks it among the war's largest emigration waves, while de Clerck and Malsagne see many returning that year after nearly 400,000 Lebanese had left by 1975. Haugbolle notes that no official figures exist.

Colonel Jean Germain Salvan was badly hurt in both legs in early May, Fisk writes, when dissident PLO gunmen fired on the Fatah jeep carrying him, killing a French soldier and his Palestinian driver; Arafat called it a crime. Hanf adds that such losses made the French unit much more careful.

According to de Clerck and Malsagne, the Security Council's call for a ceasefire came on 6 October.

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.

Fisk reads the mutilation of al-Lawzi's body as a warning to the Lebanese press: the flesh of his writing hand had been removed, by knife or acid, and two shots fired into his neck from behind. A shepherd found him, half under snow, in the Aramoun woods on 5 March.

De Clerck and Malsagne list Wadi Chahrour and Kfarchima among the National Liberals' bases in Beirut's south-eastern suburbs and end the wave of clashes between Christian militias on 2 July 1980. Ménargues describes near-daily fighting in the second half of June. Bashir Gemayel settled the rivalry by force on 7 July.

Historians date the battle of Zahleh from this day, when Lebanese Forces fighters beat off a Syrian attack on the town and a siege of some 90 days began. Ménargues says Syrian heavy guns killed 50 and wounded over 200 that day in Zahleh and the Christian zone north of Beirut.

Ménargues dates a day of intensive shelling of Zahleh, with about twenty dead, to 6 April.

Ménargues lists the participants as Syrian foreign minister Abdel Halim Khaddam, the Arab League's representative and the Saudi and Kuwaiti ambassadors, Ali Chaër and Abdel Hamid Bouayajane. That day a general strike against the Syrian presence shut down the Christian regions.

The 59-year-old ambassador was shot in his locked car at about 1.55 p.m., some 60 metres from a Syrian checkpoint (Malsagne), while heading home near the Résidence des Pins. Malsagne blames a pro-Syrian Shiite commando; the next ambassador, Paul-Marc Henry, saw a botched kidnapping ordered by Iranian intelligence. France was then moving closer to the PLO.

Hanf describes the Shi'i Amal movement fighting the Iraqi-backed Arab Liberation Front and small communist organisations in West Beirut in the first months of 1982.

Abu Nidal's group, an enemy of the PLO leadership, had shot Shlomo Argov, Israel's ambassador in London, on the night of 3 June; Israel answered with the raids. Robert Fisk notes that the bombs hit a PLO arms dump in the old stadium near Fakhani and a Palestinian children's hospital by Sabra; Palestinian sources gave 50 dead, Lebanese officials 210 civilians. The original's 'Fakhani attack' is the Israeli raid of 17 July 1981.