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.

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.

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.

The Lebanese army had under 24 hours' warning, Fisk writes, before Israeli troops began leaving Aley and the Chouf on the evening of 3 September; by the morning of the 4th they had gone. De Clerck and Malsagne count more than 10,000 Christians from over 60 villages sheltering in Deir el-Qamar.

Geneva's leaders agreed on Lebanon's 'Arab identity'. Fisk saw two reconciliations: Camille Chamoun ended five years of silence with Suleiman Frangieh, and Frangieh's public embrace of Amin Gemayel seemed to close their families' feud.

Fisk puts the Tyre bombing's dead at 60, Israelis and Shin Bet prisoners together, and says some Israeli intelligence officers had known of plans against the building at least eleven months earlier.

US aircraft struck Syrian positions on 4 December. Fisk counts one plane brought down, with the pilot dead and the co-pilot taken prisoner (Jesse Jackson obtained his release in January 1984); Hanf counts two planes lost. Hanf also places, without a date, the deaths of eight Marines from Syrian artillery fire in the same episode.

De Clerck and Malsagne date the name 'South Lebanon Army' to April 1985; in 1984 Lahad took over Haddad's existing militia. Hanf says he was a Maronite general from the Chouf, close to Chamoun; de Clerck and Malsagne say he came from Kfar Qatra and had headed army intelligence. Hanf confirms that fighting in Tripoli flared again in 1984.

Syrian troops entered Zahleh on 7 September after the Lebanese Forces' withdrawal (Hanf).

Hanf cites the observers' heavy casualties and a ceasefire nobody respected, which left them nothing to do.

The meetings produced no agreement (Hanf).

Fisk's account puts the kidnapping on 28 May 1985.

De Clerck and Malsagne do not mention the ceremony, but they record a rally outside the Lebanese embassy in Paris that day: more than 2,000 people, brought together by Frédérique Deniau under the slogan 'We are all Lebanese', among them Jean d'Ormesson, Françoise Giroud, Abbé Pierre, André Glucksmann and Claude Mauriac.

Hanf dates Aoun's dissolution, by Decree 420, to 4 November, with elections set for January 1990; Traboulsi places it in September 1989. Raymond Eddé held the decree constitutional; Georges Vedel, the French jurist consulted by Speaker Husseini, found that an interim government could not dissolve parliament.

The books place the renewed Amal-Hezbollah fighting of December 1989 in Iqlim al-Touffah, east of Sidon. Hanf says it started after Hezbollah fighters from the Bekaa crossed the zone held by the South Lebanon Army.