●Siege of Camille Chamoun at Saadiyat; residence looted and burned

During the siege of Damour (which began on 9 January 1976) the army kept a single exit open, and some 6,000 civilians took refuge in the neighbouring town of Saadiyat, where the former president and then interior minister Camille Chamoun was living in his palace. PLO and National Movement forces besieged the palace and the town; over the next two days the civilians were evacuated by sea and Chamoun by helicopter, and his palace was then looted and burned on 24 January 1976, four days after the storming of Damour and Jiyeh. The state's own interior minister could not stay in his house, a sign of the collapse of the state's authority on the ground.