Fisk reports that the bodies of Ambassador Francis Meloy, his economic counsellor Robert Waring and their Lebanese driver, abducted near the Museum crossing, were found that evening at Ramlet al-Baida, and that Arafat, once sure of the three Palestinians responsible, sent them to Tyre. De Clerck and Malsagne judge that the murders ended American efforts at a settlement through the Lebanese parties.

Barely a tenth of American and British residents accepted the evacuation, Fisk writes. The British went by road, the PLO escorting them through West Beirut and a Libyan officer on to the Syrian lines; a day later a US landing craft took evacuees off from a PLO-guarded bathing club on the Corniche.

Sudan supplied the Arab peace force's first contingent, some 2,000 men, and Libya the next (Hanf).

Yara El Khoury dates the start of the final offensive on Jisr al-Basha and Tal al-Za'tar to 22 June 1976, and Hanf's account (Jisr al-Basha stormed eight days after the first assault, on 1 July) points to the same week. The camps had been blockaded since January. Hanf says Chamoun's Tigers and Christian units of the army led the attack, the Kataeb joining later; a joint command of Bashir Gemayel (Kataeb), Dany Chamoun and Nabil Karam (NLP), Fawzi Mahfouz (Tanzim) and Etienne Saqr (Guardians of the Cedar) coordinated it (de Clerck and Malsagne).

Hanf dates Lebanese Front forces' capture of the Jisr al-Basha camp to this day; de Clerck and Malsagne give 29 June, Picard August.

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.

Ménargues has William Hawi shot by a Palestinian sniper in June 1976, at the end of the Tal al-Za'tar siege; Traboulsi places it during the siege. Bashir Gemayel succeeded him as Kataeb militia chief.

Under the Riyadh decisions of October 1976 all parties were to give up heavy weapons to the Arab Deterrent Force; the Hoss government set a 5 December 1976 deadline (Traboulsi). Fisk reports the militias did not hand them in; Hanf, that the Palestinians moved most of theirs south of the 'red line'.

De Clerck and Malsagne put the Lebanese Front's seminar at the Sayyidat al-Bir convent, not Broumana, on 21 January 1977. Its leaders, they report, judged the independence-era institutions obsolete, raised partition and defined a 'plurality of civilisational groups'. The body was the Lebanese Front, the Christian leaders' coalition, not the Lebanese Forces militia.

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

APUR, the Atelier parisien d'urbanisme, drew up this 1977 plan, the earliest of three reconstruction studies made during the war.

Syria, Hanf writes, had lost interest in disarming the Palestinians by autumn 1977, with Sadat's initiative under way, and the deal soon counted for nothing. It had bound the PLO to keep out of a ten-kilometre belt beside the Israeli frontier and, chiefly, to halt raids and shelling across it.

Hanf notes that in December 1977 Menachem Begin, Israel's prime minister, had excluded any return of the Palestinian refugees in neighbouring countries.