The siege of Damour had begun on 9 January, before the fall of Karantina; the main massacre began on 20 January (Hanf, Ménargues, Fisk, de Clerck and Malsagne; Traboulsi gives 22 or 24 January). Jiyeh fell the same day. The attackers were mainly PLA, Saiqa and Fatah units, with Lebanese leftist parties. Estimates of the dead range from about 150 bodies found plus 200 missing (Fisk) and 300-584 (de Clerck and Malsagne) to about 900 (Ménargues); some 5,000 people fled by land and sea.

Hanf writes that once Jisr al-Pasha fell on 1 July the Palestinians struck in the north, taking coastal Chekka from Tripoli by way of the Koura, with massacres, looting and arson. A Lebanese Front counter-attack with army tanks reached Tripoli's outskirts.

Israel, Hanf notes, would accept no Arab troops south of the 'red line', Syrian ones least of all. When a Syrian unit entered Nabatiyeh in January 1977, an Israeli protest got it withdrawn and the Palestinians kept the town.

Its unprecedented powers spanned planning, funding and running reconstruction. It replaced the Planning Ministry in 1977; Picard calls it the economy's 'superministry'.

Robert Fisk, who reported from the area, saw Israeli tanks on Lebanese soil near Ibl al-Saqi and Israeli shelling of Christian villages such as Rachaya al-Fukhar, where Palestinian guerrillas had dug in.

Officially no killer was named, but al-Lawzi's murder was widely blamed on his criticism of Syrian rule (Fisk; Picard). Fisk: he was seized near a Syrian army checkpoint heading for the airport.

Probably the text Picard lists as President Sarkis's 'Fourteen Points' (March 1980), one of the drafts that fed into the Taif Accord. Traboulsi notes that in that same month an American spokesman called on Lebanon to sign up to the Camp David accords.

In Ménargues's account Damascus rejected Takieddine Solh, finding him too lukewarm about Lebanese–Syrian friendship, and offered three names instead, Selim Hoss's among them.