Emirati diplomat Lana Nusseibeh, who helped deliver aid to Gaza, enters race for UN secretary general

Lana Nusseibeh, the Emirati diplomat who as the UAE's ambassador to the UN helped secure the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza, has entered the race as a late contender to succeed António Guterres as the UN secretary general.

Nusseibeh, who is of Palestinian heritage, is widely noted for her advocacy of the Palestinian cause and the two-state solution, and she has won the endorsement of the State of Palestine.

She is, however, facing criticism over the UAE's contested role in arming the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan, a group accused of genocide by two successive US administrations.

Nusseibeh has been one of the leading UAE diplomats denying reports that the UAE supplied weapons to RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan "Hemedti" Dagalo in defiance of a UN arms sales ban.

A grouping of Latin American and Caribbean states, CELAC, has sent a letter of objection to the Security Council, claiming her late entry came just as a consensus was emerging behind their region holding the UN's top job.

Nusseibeh was educated at Cambridge University and was born in 1978 in Abu Dhabi. Her father, Zaki, had emigrated there after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war made it difficult for him to return to his birthplace, Jerusalem. She is the niece of Sari Nusseibeh, the Palestinian intellectual who authored the widely admired book on Palestine, Once Upon a Country.

She justified her late but widely predicted entry on the grounds that the Security Council appears close to deadlock on the six remaining candidates, with no one able to establish a clear lead after six rounds of voting, the latest on 16 October.

The latest straw poll ended with Rebeca Grynspan of Costa Rica holding the lead spot. It was the first poll in which it was revealed whether any of the five permanent members of the 15-strong Security Council objected to a candidate.

Grynspan, however, faced objections from two unidentified permanent members. She has support from nine Security Council members and objections from five, making it harder for her to claim she is a breakaway consensus candidate. Guterres is due to stand down at the end of the year.

Other candidates include the Argentine diplomat Rafael Grossi, the UN envoy from Guyana, Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, veteran Ugandan diplomat Olara Otunnu, and Ecuador's former foreign minister María Fernanda Espinosa. Two previously declared candidates have pulled out.

In her vision statement, Nusseibeh said: "At the heart of the UN sits a wager: that states will give up a little today to gain a great deal together over time."

She added that states have not stopped needing to partner with one another, but they no longer trust that cooperation will yield sufficient returns, and that rebuilding that trust, with faster, more certain and more realistic results, is the work of the UN.

Brett McGurk, who served in the Biden administration as a top national security adviser, backed Nusseibeh for her work on Gaza, asking how the UAE became the largest global provider of humanitarian aid to Gaza according to UN data, and answering that it was because of Lana Nusseibeh, a diplomat who knows everyone and works with them.