Begun in late October 1975 (20 October in de Clerck and Malsagne's chronology), the Battle of the Hotels ran for five months, ending when the Holiday Inn fell on 20-22 March 1976. Traboulsi links its launch to Black Saturday in December.

Bishop Yuhanna Bassul's diary records 500 shells hitting Zahleh on the night of 22 December, with some 15,000 fedayeen gathered in the plain; at his appeal the army's Maghawir commando regiment came to help. Hanf writes that 3,000 men of the PLA's Yarmouk Brigade had entered from Syria on 20 December and besieged the town, which Syrian positions also shelled.

Traboulsi, de Clerck and Malsagne, and Yara El Khoury date the Syrian-mediated cease-fire to 23 January. PLA and Saiqa units attacked Zgharta in the north but were repulsed, and Zahleh, besieged, held out.

On 2 June Bashir Gemayel, having asked for a secret meeting with Kamal Jumblatt, offered him condolences and information on who had killed her. Traboulsi names her Linda al-Atrash and puts her apartment in East Beirut.

Yara El Khoury dates the start of the final offensive on Jisr al-Basha and Tal al-Za'tar to 22 June 1976, and Hanf's account (Jisr al-Basha stormed eight days after the first assault, on 1 July) points to the same week. The camps had been blockaded since January. Hanf says Chamoun's Tigers and Christian units of the army led the attack, the Kataeb joining later; a joint command of Bashir Gemayel (Kataeb), Dany Chamoun and Nabil Karam (NLP), Fawzi Mahfouz (Tanzim) and Etienne Saqr (Guardians of the Cedar) coordinated it (de Clerck and Malsagne).

Ménargues dates the formal unification of the Christian militias under Bashir Gemayel's command to 31 August 1976; Yara El Khoury has it announced to President Frangieh in early September 1976. According to de Clerck and Malsagne, 'Lebanese Forces' was not the official name until 1981, but the unified command was officially founded on 25 March 1976.

In 1976 Major Saad Haddad's force was known as the Army of Free Lebanon; it took the name South Lebanon Army only in 1985. Agreed through American mediation, the 'red line' kept Syrian and other Arab troops out of the south, where Palestinians and Christian militias kept fighting and Israel backed Haddad (Hanf).

The force is usually called the Arab Deterrent Force (ADF) in English.

The bombing came the evening the government chose a new army commander, a change arranged by Boutros, who held foreign affairs and defence, and regarded by the Christian parties as cause for war.

Hanf records that Damascus rejected the Lebanese Front's demands of May 1977: annulment of the Cairo Agreement and dispersal among other Arab states of the 200,000 Palestinians its leaders regarded as illegal entrants.

De Clerck and Malsagne and Haugbolle list this 1978 play first among Ziad Rahbani's comedies, which satirised the war from West Beirut.

Fisk dates the arrival in Tyre of UNIFIL's first unit, Colonel Jean Germain Salvan's French paratroopers, to 23 March. That morning, at the nearby Hassan Borro barracks, Palestinians and Lebanese officers nearly opened fire over the handover.

According to de Clerck and Malsagne, a Mossad agent detonated a bomb in a Volkswagen as Salameh's Chevrolet passed. His wife, Georgina Rizk, had been Lebanon's first Miss Universe.

Hanf writes that West Beirut's Sunnis sided with the Shi'is on National Day, which became a protest against every foreign armed presence; cedar flags hung all over the city.

Hanf places it in early 1980. Palestine Liberation Army units under Syrian or pro-Syrian command took over the Syrian posts in and near Beirut, while the Syrian troops, bar one garrison, quit the city's dividing line and the coast road to the south and redeployed to the heights above the capital.

De Clerck and Malsagne list Amal's opponents once Nabih Berri led it, from 1980: the Communist Party, the Communist Action Organisation, the Iraqi Baath, Fatah and the Army of Arab Lebanon. Traboulsi notes frequent fighting between Amal and the Palestinian groups and National Movement up to June 1982.

Ménargues: the attack was claimed by telephone to Reuters by an unheard-of 'Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners'. Investigators found the discarded tube of a US-made LAW anti-tank rocket, a type Israel says it passed to the Christian militias in 1976. Bashir Gemayel's own inquiry blamed the National Liberal (Ahrar) leader Elias Hannouche, whose aim was to discredit the Lebanese Forces.

In Ménargues's account the appointment came on 25 October, after Damascus had vetoed Takieddine Solh and put up three candidates including Hoss; by picking none of them Sarkis disregarded Syrian advice for the first time in his presidency.

The National Liberal holdouts in Ain el-Remmaneh were led by Elias Hannouche ('Hannache'). Hanf and de Clerck and Malsagne place the end of their autonomy in late October 1980 (de Clerck: Lebanese Forces in control of East Beirut on 31 October); Ménargues dates the decisive Lebanese Forces assault to the second half of November. There may have been two rounds.

According to Ménargues, Bashir Gemayel answered the collapse of a cease-fire on 22 April, which left 140 dead or wounded in Beirut within hours, by having the international airport shelled. On 11 May US ambassador John Gunther Dean urged the Lebanese Forces, via Alfred Madi, to let it reopen; that evening they dropped their objection.

De Clerck and Malsagne, drawing on Ronen Bergman, attribute to Ariel Sharon a series of car bombings from October 1981, carried out under the name 'Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners' and aimed chiefly at Palestinians, to provoke retaliation that could justify an invasion. They list no individual attacks, so this bombing cannot be matched to their account.

Among the targets on 27 July was an apartment building on Iskandar Street where, according to Robert Fisk, almost a hundred people were killed.