This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Lebanon's fifteen-year war has no official casualty count, and the figures still cited today diverge by a wide margin. Reporters covering the war's final phase in 1990 settled on a round figure near 150,000 dead, repeated ever since in encyclopedia entries and news retrospectives. The Lebanese demographers Boutros Labaki and Khalil Abou Rjeily set out in the early 1990s to test that figure against parish, hospital and municipal records rather than repeat it, and arrived at a considerably lower total near 90,000. Later reviewers of the historiography have judged the Labaki and Abou Rjeily study the most methodologically rigorous count available, and treated the widely repeated higher figure as an artifact of wartime press reporting that was never subjected to the same scrutiny.
Whether the war itself should be called a religious war is a separate and contested question. Lebanon's fighting lined up combatants largely along confessional community, and popular memory of the war often reduces it to Christian against Muslim. The historian Fawwaz Traboulsi's account argues this framing mistakes the war's visible fault lines for its causes: the confessional power-sharing system itself, entrenched economic inequality between and within communities, and the destabilizing armed Palestinian presence drove the fighting, with religious community serving as the identity militias recruited along rather than as the war's actual grievance.
On this reading Lebanon fought a sectarian war, in which religious affiliation sorted the combatants, rather than a religious one, in which religious doctrine supplied the cause. Both readings agree on where the killing happened and roughly how much of it there was; they differ on what, underneath the confessional labels, actually drove it.