Syrian helicopters and armoured limousines carried the 67 deputies to the Park Hotel in Chtaura, in the Syrian-held Bekaa, where 2,000 Syrian soldiers and 40 tanks guarded the ceremony (Fisk). Sarkis used his address to declare that Lebanon itself had invited the Syrian army in (Hanf).

From Sarkis's inauguration on 23 September Hanf counts three quiet days, the Semiramis Hotel attack in Damascus and a Syrian move two days after it, placing this offensive at about 28 September. The Palestinian and leftist forces lost the Upper Metn; Traboulsi notes that the Joint Forces' largest concentration, there under Abu Khalid al-Amleh, never engaged the advancing Syrians.

Its members were technocrats and businessmen; the one politician, Fouad Boutros, held both foreign affairs and defence (Traboulsi). Early on, at Syria's behest, it brought in press censorship (Hanf, Fisk); Traboulsi also mentions an order for militias to surrender their arms.

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'.

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.

Israel's Christian allies emerged with a slightly wider strip, spanning nearly the whole frontier from sea to Hermon; Fisk dates the tank withdrawal to 26 September.

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

Colonel Jean Germain Salvan was badly hurt in both legs in early May, Fisk writes, when dissident PLO gunmen fired on the Fatah jeep carrying him, killing a French soldier and his Palestinian driver; Arafat called it a crime. Hanf adds that such losses made the French unit much more careful.

De Clerck and Malsagne record that Frangieh had quit the Lebanese Front the day before over its ties with Israel. The reconciliation, Hanf notes, made the north a pro-Syrian bloc.

Musa al-Sadr travelled to Libya on 25 August (de Clerck and Malsagne) at the invitation of the Libyan government (Ménargues) and was never seen again; Hanf dates the disappearance to September. Beirut papers speculated about the Shah's secret police or Libyan intelligence. Fisk writes that he was almost certainly killed in Libya. The loss mobilised the Shi'a and later strengthened Amal.

Schools, hospitals and factories were destroyed in the new bombardment, and Lebanese gendarmes logged 2,000 impacts a day in Achrafieh. Hanf links it to the Camp David agreement reached a few days before.