UAE diplomat running for UN chief faces questions over her country's support for Sudan rebels

JERUSALEM (AP) — A female diplomat from the United Arab Emirates is the newest contender for the role of United Nations secretary-general.

Lana Nusseibeh brings Palestinian roots and defense of the UAE’s historic relations with Israel to her candidacy, but she faces sharp criticism over her country's alleged role in backing paramilitary fighters who have killed thousands in Sudan’s civil war. The Gulf nation has denied the claims.

Nusseibeh, who has a master’s in Israeli and Jewish Diaspora Studies, declared her candidacy this week in a race that had largely stalled. No woman has ever led the world body throughout its 80 years of existence.

Any leader succeeding Antonio Guterres in January would inherit a U.N. weakened by harsh criticism and steep funding cuts by the Trump administration. The U.N.’s role has perhaps never been more questioned as global powers create alternative bodies of influence, wars rage, hunger grows and epidemics like Ebola pose fresh challenges every day.

She will face questions from U.N. General Assembly members as part of the candidacy process on Tuesday.

Nusseibeh, who was nominated this week by the UAE government and has taken a leave of absence from the foreign ministry, spent over a decade as her country’s ambassador to the U.N., from 2013 to 2024. She has been outspoken on issues including aid for Palestinians in Gaza, the historic Abraham Accord with Israel in 2020 and the role of women on the international stage.

A request for an interview brought no immediate response Friday. Already, the six state members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which also includes Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have unanimously backed her.

“I will bring greater urgency to the work for peace,” Nusseibeh’s statement declaring her candidacy says. “I believe deeply in this institution because of where I come from. People in my region see what diplomacy and collective action can achieve. And they feel the consequences when it fails.”

Nusseibeh, born in 1978, wants to “rebuild trust” in the U.N. and says it should use “quiet diplomacy” to keep disputes from escalating. She also addresses a booming global issue, artificial intelligence, saying the U.N. should build “practical international cooperation before divisions harden, including voluntary incident reporting.”

Nusseibeh, whose uncle Sari Nusseibeh is a well-known Palestinian scholar, has family roots in Jerusalem and a long interest in the region beyond Gulf affairs. She is known for her advocacy for helping to get aid to the 2 million or so Palestinians trapped in Gaza.

“How did UAE become the largest global provider of humanitarian aid to Gaza, according to U.N. data? Because of Lana Nusseibeh — a diplomat who knows everyone and works with them to (get stuff done). She would be an inspired choice for this impossible job,” Brett McGurk, former White House envoy, said on X this week.

While holding the rotating presidency of the U.N. Security Council in 2023, several months before the war in Gaza began, Nusseibeh organized a special session on Palestine. And in 2025, she openly warned that Israeli annexation of the occupied West Bank would be a “red line” for the UAE.

But Nusseibeh could face what some believe is a conflict of interest over Sudan. The war and the UAE's alleged role in it has been explored by various arms of the U.N.

Rights groups and others have for years documented evidence of UAE backing for the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces that have been fighting Sudan's military in the civil war that erupted in April 2023.

The RSF has been accused of atrocities including the attack on the city of el-Fasher in October 2025 in which the U.N. said at least 6,000 people were killed.

“The U.N. has concluded, in part based on the evidence of our lab at Yale, that the massacre has the hallmarks of genocide,” Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, told the AP.

He said the el-Fasher massacre could not have happened without the UAE's provision of drones, mercenaries to operate them and artillery and mortars used in the siege of the city.

“An official of the government that did this cannot be allowed to lead the United Nations, especially when this conduct is under investigation by the ICC, a U.N. body,” Raymond said.

Last year, Sudan filed a case at the top U.N. court accusing the United Arab Emirates of breaching the genocide convention by arming and funding the RSF. The UAE asserted the case was “nothing more than a cynical publicity stunt.”

Nusseibeh was the UAE's point person on Sudan, according to Justin Lynch, managing director of the Conflict Insights Group research organization. “Throughout this war, she assured other governments that the UAE was not backing the RSF, even as Washington and other capitals knew internally that it was,” he told the AP.

The U.N. secretary-general's role is to protect civilians from horrors like el-Fasher, Lynch said. “Handing the job over to the diplomat who ran cover for it would be an insult to the survivors.”

Associated Press writer Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed.

FILE - Minister for Foreign Affairs of the United Arab Emirates Lana Nusseibeh addresses the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Saturday, Sept. 27, 2025, at U.N. headquarters. (AP Photo/Pamela Smith, File)

FILE - Lana Zaki Nusseibeh, Permanent Representative to the United Nations of the United Arab Emirates, speaks during a Security Council meeting, Thursday, Feb. 23, 2023, at United Nations headquarters. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)

FILE - Minister of State of the United Arab Emirates, Lana Nusseibeh speaks during a news conference at the port in city of Limassol, Cyprus, on Friday, Nov. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Petros Karadjias, File)

The Oregon man who fatally shot a teenage gunman to end a deadly rampage at an elementary school last week says he was the children's “last line of defense” and that he regrets not arriving soon enough to save them all.

Kaylub Giamanco, whose two daughters attend Silver Rail Elementary, where the Oct. 15 attack occurred, said he feels like he failed the families of those who died.

“I want to apologize for not saving their babies, that’s probably the biggest thing for me right now,” Giamanco told Oregon Public Broadcasting in an interview published Friday. “The gratitude for saving people’s children is awesome. But there were ones that I didn’t save.”

Three children — ages 5, 8 and 11 — and a teacher were killed at the school in Bend, Oregon, last week when a former student there, 16-year-old Griffin J. John II, blasted his way through locked doors with a shotgun and attacked a special needs classroom. Another student was critically injured and a teacher was injured and hospitalized.

Police say another teacher threw her phone at the attacker and wrestled with him before Giamanco shot and killed him after following the gunman into the building.

Giamanco said he dropped off his daughters at the school that morning before driving to work. A few hours later, the 36-year-old carpenter was passing the school again as he was heading home for lunch.

He said he spotted someone wearing black and carrying a long gun fire shots into a pickup truck and at a person mowing the school's lawn before the shooter climbed a fence and headed toward the school building.

Giamanco said “panic fled into my brain.” He grabbed a .40-caliber handgun from his truck's center console and went after the gunman as he dialed 911. He asked the dispatcher to send help before hanging up his phone.

“I said 'I’m sorry I have to go in. People are going to die,'” Giamanco said in the interview.

As he got closer to the building, Giamanco said, he lay on his stomach and used his elbows to crawl across the ground.

“That’s when I started hearing children pleading for their lives,” he said. “And then I started hearing gunfire and I just started army crawling faster and faster. And I told myself: 'This is probably the last thing that I’m ever going to do.'”

Giamanco said he entered the school through a window that had been shot out. Peeking into a nearby classroom, he saw a teacher grappling with the shooter. He said he faced them both in profile, giving him an open shot.

“I felt like I was the last line of defense between him and the rest of the children,” Giamanco said.

He swung the door open, stepped into the room and fired his gun.

Both the gunman and the teacher dropped to the floor. The teacher bolted from the room as the shooter reached for his shotgun.

“He was scrambling for his weapon,” Giamanco said. “I looked at him and I shot him two more times to make sure that he couldn’t move, because I was afraid of him shooting anybody else.”

Police have said Giamanco was carrying his gun legally in his truck and have credited him and the unarmed teacher who confronted the gunman with saving lives. A day after the shootings, President Donald Trump said that Giamanco was a “great hero” who “took care of business.”

A second teacher in the classroom, Becky Drury, said in a statement Wednesday that she lay on the floor, helplessly playing dead, after being struck at close range by a shotgun blast that nearly severed her left hand.

The teacher who struggled with the shooter hasn't been publicly identified. Giamanco told the public broadcaster that she's “a real true hero” whose actions gave him an opening to kill the attacker.

“I can’t tell you what it feels like to take a life … but I can tell you that I genuinely feel like I was supposed to be there,” Giamanco said. “If I wasn’t there, I just don’t know what would have happened.”

Bynum reported from Savannah, Georgia.

Children place flowers at a makeshift memorial outside Silver Rail Elementary in Bend, Ore., Friday, Oct. 16, 2026, a day after a deadly shooting. (AP Photo/Joe Kline)

Police tape is placed outside Silver Rail Elementary school, where a shooting took place, on Thursday, Oct. 15, 2026 in Bend, Ore. (AP Photo/Joe Kline)