The National Movement's call for a general strike, supported by the leading Sunni politicians, Mufti Hassan Khaled, Musa al-Sadr and Raymond Edde, brought down the military cabinet on 26 May; on 28 May Frangieh appointed Rashid Karami Prime Minister.

Fisk adds that the Syrian shelling slackened around this time after sonic booms from a pair of Israeli jets flying low over West Beirut.

Ménargues has the Hittin brigade's 1,350 Palestine Liberation Army soldiers driving out to Damascus on 26 August, as Italian Bersaglieri of the San Marco regiment and more French legionnaires came ashore. Robert Fisk dates the first US Marine landing to 25 August; Ménargues to 27 August.

Hanf dates Amal's first fighting with the army to March 1983, after soldiers had arrested large numbers of Shi'is on dubious charges.

Ménargues dates the handover to 28 April 1983. Held in an army intelligence cell at the Defence Ministry in Yarze, Chartouni admitted the killing before the military prosecutor that day. The case was later handed by Amine Gemayel's cabinet to a constitutional High Court that had never been created; he was freed on 13 October 1990.

About fifty Christian villages east of Sidon and in the Iqlim al-Kharroub were taken. Estimates of the Christians displaced range from 70,000 (Picard) and 85,000-86,000 (Hanf) to 80,000-125,000 (de Clerck and Malsagne), many reaching East Beirut by sea; few have returned. Hanf writes that the Kharroub villages were razed with Transport Ministry equipment; Fisk describes Mieh Mieh looted and torn down, and a well filled with corpses at Jiyeh after the Druze took it.

Hanf writes that Prime Minister Karami joined Jumblatt and Berri in boycotting cabinet sessions chaired by Gemayel, whose resignation the two had demanded after the Tripartite Agreement failed.

Historians give lower figures for 1986: retail inflation of 162 per cent (Hanf, after the central bank) or a 95 per cent rise in Beirut consumer prices, and a 134 per cent devaluation of the pound (de Clerck and Malsagne).

With a budget deficit near 80 percent, the government leaned on central bank loans, then on printing money (Hanf). Inflation in 1987 was 450 or 620 percent depending on the index (de Clerck and Malsagne; Hanf), and close to one Lebanese in five was poor (Picard).

Hanf (p. 317, note 221) describes a Hezbollah anti-tank attack on an armoured car carrying four senior Syrian officers, without casualties, in connection with the Syrian entry into the suburbs.

Hanf sees the cabinet as falling short of Taif's national unity government, since Michel Sassine stayed in Paris and Kataeb leader Georges Saadé wavered.