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.

Picard places the wave of killings of Communist and pro-Iraqi Baath leaders in January 1986.

Hanf records no resignation by Karami in 1986. He says Karami resisted calls to resign that autumn and resigned only on 4 May 1987.

Hanf says the army units around the camps were backed by a Syrian battalion.

The meetings produced no agreement (Hanf).

Fisk dates Frank Reed's kidnapping to 9 September.

He was shot in the head 25 m from the ambassador's office, a day after the rue de Rennes attack in Paris (7 dead, 55 wounded).

Dates differ: 27 September (de Clerck and Malsagne), 29 September (Hanf), or by 26 September (Ménargues). Hanf has the Lebanese army halting an attack launched across the green line from West Beirut, after which former comrades killed a few hundred of Hobeika's men.

Fisk's account puts the kidnapping on 28 May 1985.

Hanf: the PLO took Maghdousheh on 24 November, lost it to Amal on the 25th and retook it on the 26th. De Clerck and Malsagne say the aim was to forestall an attack on Ain el-Helweh; Amal answered by besieging the southern camps and pressing the Beirut ones harder.

Typhoid broke out in besieged Chatila during this third camps war.

Picard puts the toll of the December 1986 Syrian bombardment of Tripoli at more than 100 dead.

The Antenne 2 crew was kidnapped on 8 March 1986 (de Clerck and Malsagne), not on 21 June.

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).

Historians describe the collapse of real wages behind such decrees: against 1974, the statutory minimum wage kept 13 percent of its buying power at the end of 1986 (Hanf, after Abou Rjaily and Labaki).

The third 'war of the camps' had begun in the south at the end of September 1986; fighting resumed in the Beirut camps in December. By early January 1987 it had cost over 500 dead and 2,000 wounded, by a French diplomatic estimate. The books describe Amal's adversaries as PLO fighters, mostly loyal to Arafat.

Hanf mentions the failed attempt on Chamoun's life early in 1987 and notes that he died in August of that year.

Counts differ: Hanf, after Abou Rjaily and Labaki (figures to late 1987), counts about fifty foreigners kidnapped in Lebanon, including twenty Americans and nine Frenchmen. The figure of 18 French nationals may include people who were not kidnapped; its basis is not known.

Traboulsi dates the break between the two presidents to their meeting of 13-14 January 1986, when Gemayel rejected the Syrian-sponsored Tripartite Accord.