When Hamida Deeb's turn finally came, the 32-year-old Lebanese woman hunched over the text of her affidavit, trembling as she addressed 200 people in the Palais des Nations in Geneva.

Hamida limps on the artificial leg she received from a charity, and she needs help to pull her coat on and off. Her right arm was torn off by an Israeli proximity shell in the UNIFIL base at Qana on April 18th, 1996.

Hamida has grown plump because she cannot exercise, and she wears the long robe and headscarf of a Shia Muslim woman. In a society where youth and health are particularly prized, it is unlikely she will ever marry.

Yet representatives of member-states of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, observer states and dozens of NGOs craned their necks to see the shy woman who spoke so painstakingly at the back of the assembly hall.

"I have waited four years for this moment," Hamida said emotionally. "Coming here is very symbolic for me. When I saw the blue [United Nations] flag flying over this building, I remembered seeing another blue flag, and running to it for protection. Again, I come to you hoping for protection."

Hamida and her family fled their home in Rashqinayeh on April 9th, 1996, after the South Lebanon Army, the militia allied with Israel, announced that their village would be bombed in Israel's Grapes of Wrath offensive. For nine days, as food grew scarce and explosions continued, the Deeb family sheltered with 800 other refugees at the headquarters of the Fijian Battalion in Qana.

When the first shells fell on the UNIFIL compound, "screaming grew louder and people started running in all directions, colliding with each other as they tried to escape," Hamida told the spellbound UN audience a few days ago. In the chaos, she knew she had been wounded but held more tightly to her nephews, eight-year-old Mohamed and seven-year-old Hamza.

"My brother's children flew away from my bosom in body pieces, and with them flew my right arm and leg," she continued. She had been sitting beneath a tree that caught fire "and the burning leaves started to fall on my wounds like fireballs and I told myself that this was my end."

When the 17-minute bombardment ended, 20 of Hamida Deeb's relatives lay dead around her, including her sister, sister-in-law and two nephews. "I wished I was dead rather than return home without them," she said. In all, 106 Lebanese civilians were slaughtered at Qana, 52 of them children.

Although a UN inquiry headed by the Dutch Gen Franklin van Kappen concluded that Israel's bombardment of the Lebanese refugees was almost certainly deliberate, nearly four years later no Israeli has been punished for it, the victims have received no compensation and - under pressure from the US - the UN has kept secret the evidence unearthed by Gen van Kappen.

Hamida Deeb and Haidar Bitar, whose sons aged eight and nine were also killed in the massacre, took the UN floor in Geneva for a total of 10 minutes over the past two weeks. "Three-and-a-half years for 10 minutes," said Mary Ramadan, the Palestinian-American lawyer who accompanied them. Because she felt sorry for the Qana victims, Ms Ramadan worked without pay, neglecting her US immigration law practice in Maryland.

Together with John Quigley, a professor of international law at Ohio State University who represented Bosnian victims of the Serbs in The Hague, and Susan Akram, another Arab-American lawyer, Ms Ramadan filed a petition with Mary Robinson's Human Rights Commission on the second anniversary of the massacre, asking that Gen van Kappen's underlying evidence be released, a special rapporteur appointed and victims be awarded compensation; all within the UN Commission's power.

Fearing retaliation from the Israelis or the SLA, two of seven Lebanese families withdrew their affidavits when the Human Rights Commission said their identities had to be revealed. Haidar Bitar received a deportation order from US authorities after he became a party to the petition.

Last October Ms Ramadan won asylum in the US for him and surviving family members, on the grounds that the killing of his eldest two sons by the Israelis constituted persecution.

The US lawyers never received a formal response from the Human Rights Commission, but last summer they were told unofficially that the UN body would not hear the case of the Qana victims, despite the fact that they were wounded and their relatives killed while under UN protection. A group called Nord-Sud XXI agreed to give its floor time, as a UN-accredited NGO, to the victims. Apart from that, nothing.

The Qana victims' dead-end quest for justice "highlights the shortcomings of the mechanisms available to pursue human rights violations," Prof Quigley said. The lawyers gave up suing Israel in a US court because it was prohibitively expensive. The only other option would have been for the Lebanese government to sue Israel for genocide in The Hague.

The fact that civilians were targeted and that there was a deliberate attempt to depopulate the region would have given Lebanon some grounds, Prof Quigley said, but the outcome was uncertain. Although international law defines genocide as the intention to destroy a population "in whole or in part", the meaning of "in part" is ill defined.

Nord-Sud XXI says it will continue to raise Qana at the Human Rights Commission, but the volunteer US lawyers feel they have exhausted legal possibilities. For Mary Ramadan, the years of effort and the trip to Geneva were nonetheless worthwhile. "It was important to Hamida to make that address," she said. "Four years of pain and suffering poured out of her. For a few minutes, the world heard her. From our perspective as lawyers, that means something."