Fisk's figures for December 1984 alone: some hundred attacks on Israeli forces in the south, with three Israeli soldiers, seventeen of Lahad's militiamen and eight collaborators killed.

Picard dates the end of President Gemayel's talks with Israel to January 1985.

Hanf dates the army's advance to 9 January 1985, the day he says the Israelis began to pull back. In his account the plan, agreed with Walid Jumblatt, the Sidon Nasserites and the region's Christian deputies, sent a mainly Muslim battalion into the Iqlim al-Kharroub and the Sidon hinterland.

De Clerck and Malsagne say Edmond Naim succeeded Michel el-Khoury at the Central Bank because both the militia chiefs and the unity cabinet could accept him.

The withdrawal was unilateral and staged. Antoine Lahad's militia, renamed the South Lebanon Army and backed by Israel, was to police the 'security zone' Israel kept. Historians date the departure from Sidon to 17 February (Traboulsi), and the fall-back to the security zone to May-June 1985 (de Clerck and Malsagne).

Saad survived, nearly blind, but was absent when Israel left Sidon. The UN spokesman told Fisk Israel had held up clearance by half an hour for the UN helicopter flying him to the American University hospital.

Picard dates the end of the talks with Israel to January 1985 and links it to the Lebanese Forces' revolt two months later.

Annual figures: the pound fell to about 16 to the dollar in 1985 against 6.5 in 1984, with retail inflation of about 70 per cent (Hanf, citing Abou Rjaily and Labaki); de Clerck and Malsagne put the 1985 devaluation at 150 per cent. Hanf notes that rumours of large PLO deposits briefly strengthened the pound in early 1985.

Traboulsi dates Israel's exit from Sidon to 17 February 1985. Fisk describes Christians and Muslims briefly celebrating together when Lebanese troops arrived.

Prime Minister Rashid Karami travelled with Gemayel. Hanf records kidnappings of Christians and counter-kidnappings after several thousand Islamists from Beirut rallied in Sidon next day for an Islamic republic while the army stood aside.

A passenger died on the runway, flung there by the jets' blast, because the hijacker, Fisk writes, made the Larnaca plane take off with its doors open.

Israeli losses: de Clerck and Malsagne count 670 dead and nearly 3,000 wounded between June 1982 and June 1985 (and 721 dead and 3,890 wounded for the whole war); Traboulsi writes of some 500 dead. Israel kept a 'security zone' policed with Lahad's South Lebanon Army.

An American passenger was hijacked twice in a day, Fisk writes: moved from the Jordanian plane, which Amal gunmen set alight on the runway, onto an MEA Boeing that a Lebanese then seized in protest.

Fisk identifies the TWA 847 hijackers as Hezbollah members operating as Islamic Jihad and names Imad Mughniyeh as the planner; the passenger they killed was Robert Stethem, a US Navy diver. Amal moved most of the passengers into the southern suburbs. In the end Syrian officers received the hostages and took them to Damascus, and Israel released its Lebanese Shia prisoners over the next two months.

This ceasefire closed only the first round (May-June 1985) of the 'War of the Camps', also known as the 'Ramadan war'; by the time Syria imposed it, Fisk reports, 600 people had died. Sieges and fighting returned in 1986 and went on until 1987-1988; de Clerck and Malsagne count 2,000 to 3,000 victims in all.

Elias Sarkis died in Paris (de Clerck and Malsagne).

Syrian troops entered Zahleh on 7 September after the Lebanese Forces' withdrawal (Hanf).

On 7 October, Hanf writes, 20,000 Syrian soldiers entered Tripoli, after pro-Syrian groups had in September 1985 attacked the Tawheed movement then holding the city; some 250,000 civilians fled.

In Hanf's account Berri offered the Christians a choice: a census to reset sectarian proportions, or an end to proportionality. Asked by Jumblatt why Syria dealt with Hobeika, Khaddam reportedly said everyone in Lebanon was a murderer.

Fisk dates it 1 October 1985, de Clerck and Malsagne September. Arkady Katkov was killed. Fisk thinks Sunni fundamentalists wanted Moscow to make Syria halt its Tripoli offensive against Tawheed. The others' release is credited probably to the KGB and Syria by de Clerck and Malsagne, to Syrian mediation by Hanf.

Signed in Damascus by Elie Hobeika (Lebanese Forces), Nabih Berri (Amal) and Walid Jumblatt (PSP) under Syrian sponsorship. It provided for Christian-Muslim parity during a transition towards the end of political sectarianism, a stronger prime minister and cabinet, a senate, and 'strategic complementarity' with Syria. It did not end the war: President Gemayel refused it and, in January 1986, Samir Geagea's forces drove Hobeika out of East Beirut. Its provisions were largely taken up in the Taif Agreement of 1989.