In Ménargues, Damascus unofficially signalled no objection to transit through Latakia on 7 July, then officially refused the fighters on 9 July, the day Israeli troops took the Beit Eddine army barracks.

David Dodge was the acting president of AUB. Two gunmen in a car seized him on the campus; he was held for a year, taken to Iran, and released with Syrian help (Fisk).

Bashir Gemayel announced his candidacy on 24 July on the Kataeb radio Voice of Lebanon, introduced by his brother Amine (Ménargues; Hanf gives 25 July). The Lebanese Front had already endorsed him on 26 May.

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

The attempt on Walid Jumblatt left him only slightly hurt. Hanf sees it as one more spur to Druze mobilisation, which put about 30,000 men under arms.

Early in 1983 the Eighth Brigade went into all of Beirut, the east included, under a plan to collect light arms in the city and clear heavy weapons and gunmen from Greater Beirut. The Lebanese Forces resisted, then on 1 March 1983 agreed to return East Beirut and the port's fifth basin to the state.

Israel's announcement on 20 July of an early pull-out from the Chouf mountains, made while Gemayel was in Washington, alarmed Western ambassadors in Beirut (Fisk).

Fisk writes that Dodge was held for months in Iran, though Lebanese reporters put part of his captivity in a Revolutionary Guards house at Zabadani, Syria. Reagan publicly thanked Hafez and Rifaat Assad for their help.

Hanf lists Frangieh, Karami, Jumblatt and the left-wing parties as members and says Amal and the Islamic groups did not formally join; Traboulsi counts Amal among the forces that rallied to the Front.

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.

The New Jersey fired shells, not bombs: one-ton 16-inch rounds, according to Fisk. De Clerck and Malsagne say its rounds often missed, by up to 9,000 metres, and killed civilians; Christians called it 'New Jersa', a new shame.

On 15 December, after 102 days, the siege of Deir el-Qamar ended. Israel brokered the departure of Samir Geagea's Lebanese Forces and most refugees for East Beirut; the town was left mainly to its elderly.

Escorted by five French warships, Greek ships including the Odysseus carried Arafat and some 4,000 men from Tripoli to Tunis, the PLO's second evacuation from Lebanon after Beirut in 1982.