Managing genocide attribution: deniability, containment and US foreign policy discourse on Gaza

This study examines how genocide is negotiated in public question–response exchanges involving US foreign policy officials during the war on Gaza. Drawing on the framework of elite denial and on accounts of plausible deniability, it analyses question–response sequences in which journalists introduce casualty figures, institutional findings, and legal criteria that escalate the inferential pathway from large-scale civilian harm towards genocide classification. The findings show that journalist questions construct a cumulative narrative of systematic destruction, while spokesperson responses contain this escalation through categorical denial, mitigation, transfer of responsibility, alternative goal framing, and selective legal engagement. At the same time, officials acknowledge severe humanitarian suffering and emphasise diplomatic and relief efforts, producing a pattern of interpretative containment in which genocide remains publicly discussable but institutionally non-actionable. In a context of high visibility and competing international legal assessments, genocide attribution persists as a durable counter-frame, revealing the limits of narrative control. The analysis suggests that alliance-protective deniability enables short-term policy flexibility but risks reinforcing perceptions of selective legalism, with implications for the credibility of US foreign policy and its self-positioning as a defender of a rules-based international order.