We arrived at our friends' home with gleaming smiles, but were received with dejected expressions.
"Haven't you heard the news?" they asked. "What news?" we replied.
"The massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians in and around Sabra and Shatila camps," was their wretched response.
Needless to say we were glued to the TV listening to trickling reports from inside the camps and watching bloated bodies of women and children paraded on TV screens.
Starting at 6pm on September 16 until 8am on September 18, the Israeli-armed Lebanese Phalange militia went on a killing spree while the Israeli army besieged the camps - stopping anyone from fleeing the massacre.
American reporter Janet Lee Stevens, who was one of the first foreign journalists to enter the camps, described the scene.
"Children with their throats slit, a pregnant woman with her stomach chopped open, her eyes still wide open, her blackened face silently screaming in horror; countless babies and toddlers who had been stabbed or ripped apart and who had been thrown into garbage piles," she documented.
I didn't realise at the time that my cousin Saleh and his children were among those murdered in the 36-hour killing orgy.
A 1983 United Nations (UN) team investigating the massacre concluded that "Israel bore responsibility" for the killing of civilians.
In the same year, Israel's own appointed Kahane Commission reached a similar conclusion - accusing Ariel Sharon of bearing "personal responsibility" for the slaughtering of women and children.
Despite being held accountable for killing more than 3,000 civilians, Sharon refused to resign his Defence Minister post and his patron, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, snubbed requests to fire him.
Following strong pressure from the international community and violent civilian protests in the streets of Tel Aviv Sharon finally agreed to quit the military post, but was retained in the Cabinet as a minister without portfolio.
Less than two decades after the massacre, the former Ariel Scheinerman- born to a Belarusian couple before changing his family name to Sharon- was elected to Israel's highest office serving as prime minister from 2001 until he suffered a brain haemorrhage in 2006 rendering him comatose.
He followed in the footsteps of two other Israelis: Isaac Shamir and Begin, who decorated Britain's most wanted terrorist list in the 1940s.
They too were recognised for their murderous contributions to Zionism, reaching the highest political office in the Israeli government.
The Sabra and Shatilla massacre was just one of Sharon's terrorist achievements on behalf of the state of Israel. He first gained notoriety in the 1950s, serving as a leader in the special, brutal Israeli army Unit 101.
Sharon's first decorated massacre was in the autumn of 1953 when his unit attacked the village of Qibya and dynamited houses - killing 69 civilians, including children, sleeping peacefully in their homes.
While human rights organisations, along with relatives of murdered civilians, lament Sharon's escape from justice on earth, morally corrupt leaders of so-called world democracies are absurdly calling this same person - who massacred women and children - a "man of peace".
In memory of my cousin Saleh and for all those people he massacred throughout his murderous career, I will forever remember Sharon as a decorated butcher.
About the author
Jamal Kanj (jamalkanj.com) writes regular newspaper column and publishes on several websites. He is the author of "Children of Catastrophe," Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America. A version of this article was first published by the Gulf Daily News newspaper.
Anyway it was Shin Beth who organised his stroke, then made sure he died by putting him into an ambulance, instead of the available helicopter, and sending it off into peak hour traffic. Then, in the ambulance he was given the wrong drugs which left him brain dead.
Also, proving how deeply racist Israelis are, they accused him of not being a "Real" Jew.
He may have been a butcher and a war criminal, but not enough so for those psychopaths.
Here are some juicy Sharon quotes:
"Even today I volunteer to do the dirty work for Israel, to kill as many Arabs as necessary, to deport them, to expel and burn them, to have everyone hate us, to pull the rug out from underneath the feet of the Diaspora Jews, so that they will be forced to run to us crying. Even if it means blowing up a few synagogues, I don’t care. And I don’t mind if after the job is done you put me in front of a Nuremberg Trial and then jail me for life. Hang me if you want, as a war criminal… What your kind doesn’t understand is that the dirty work of Zionism is not finished yet, far from it."
Sharon actually bragged about being evil:
“Tell me, do the evil men of this world have a bad time? They hunt and catch whatever they feel like eating. They don’t suffer from indigestion and are not punished by Heaven. I want Israel to join that club. Maybe the world will then at last begin to fear us instead of feeling sorry. Maybe they will start to tremble, to fear our madness instead of admiring our nobility. Let them tremble, let them call us a mad state. Let them understand that we are a savage country, dangerous to our surroundings, not normal, that we might go wild, that we might start World War Three just like that, or that we might one day go crazy and burn all the oil fields in the Middle East. Personally, I don’t want to be any better than Harry Truman who snuffed out half a million Japanese with two fine bombs.”
Here is another revealing quote attributed to Sharon :
“I vow that I’ll burn every Palestinian child that will be born in this area. The Palestinian woman and child are more dangerous than the man, because the Palestinian child’s existence infers that generations will go on…”
Under Sharon, the Israeli Defense Forces had a de facto official policy of “enticing Palestinian children like mice into a trap to murder them for sport,” as journalist Chris Hedges described it in his 2001 article “Gaza Diary.” The sport-shootings of children that Hedges witnessed are official Israeli policy; a British Medical Journal study a few years later confirmed more than 600 sniper murders of Palestinian children by the Israeli military.