Nureddine al-Rifai was a retired Sunni officer: a general according to Hanf, a brigadier-general according to Traboulsi, an officer of the gendarmerie according to de Clerck and Malsagne.

De Clerck and Malsagne and Tegho Bou Nassif date Zahleh's entry into the war to 24 August 1975, when Palestinian fighters planted a bomb in its tourist district, Wadi al-Arayish. In Hanf's account, Zahleh's Christians and Shi'is of its outskirts and nearby villages, helped by Palestinian guerrillas, came to blows late in August after a non-political arcade quarrel. Three Zahleh men were executed at the end of August.

Hanf traces the line that went on dividing the city along the Damascus road and across Martyrs Square to the harbour. It was set once the Kataeb, losing the Holiday Inn, had no positions left in West Beirut.

Syrian helicopters and armoured limousines carried the 67 deputies to the Park Hotel in Chtaura, in the Syrian-held Bekaa, where 2,000 Syrian soldiers and 40 tanks guarded the ceremony (Fisk). Sarkis used his address to declare that Lebanon itself had invited the Syrian army in (Hanf).

De Clerck and Malsagne put the Lebanese Front's seminar at the Sayyidat al-Bir convent, not Broumana, on 21 January 1977. Its leaders, they report, judged the independence-era institutions obsolete, raised partition and defined a 'plurality of civilisational groups'. The body was the Lebanese Front, the Christian leaders' coalition, not the Lebanese Forces militia.

Fisk adds that during the invasion Gur declared that Israel would fall back to the Christian enclaves as a border 'security belt': the strip that became Major Haddad's.

Neither parliament nor president could enforce the resolution, Hanf notes. The 74 deputies in attendance passed it without dissent: it reserved arms to the legitimate Lebanese forces, told the Palestinians and 'other parties' to end armed action, and applied Lebanese law to all on Lebanese soil.

Schools, hospitals and factories were destroyed in the new bombardment, and Lebanese gendarmes logged 2,000 impacts a day in Achrafieh. Hanf links it to the Camp David agreement reached a few days before.

Ménargues: once the Saudis said in March 1979 they would hand their positions to the army, an army–militia clash looked inevitable; intelligence chief Johnny Abdo reopened contact with Bashir.

The Arab summit met in Tunis from 20 to 22 November 1979.

Ménargues writes that Bashir Gemayel usually took Maya to her grandmother's on Saturdays but, sick after the sea crossing from Jerusalem the day before, had her governess and his bodyguards take her in his car, which was blown up less than a kilometre from his home. He blames the Palestinians there; later he says an inquiry into Aman el-Mandoubine, a network run by a Fatah intelligence officer, led to the arrest of two Christians who planted the bomb. One annex dates the attack 21 February.

Syrian troops guarded Riad Taha's and al-Lawzi's funerals, Fisk notes; the government condemned both killings but claimed not to know the culprits. Fisk counts both among journalists who crossed Syria.

Ménargues: the Housing and Cooperatives portfolio went to Selim Jahel, a law professor who drafted Bashir Gemayel's main French letters and speeches. When Amine Gemayel pressed for his ally Samy Maroun as well, Bashir insisted on one or the other, and Sarkis chose Jahel.

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.