In her latest film, American Doctor, the Malaysian-American filmmaker Poh Si Teng profiles three American physicians with diverse backgrounds—Jewish, Palestinian, and Zoroastrian—who volunteer in hospitals in Gaza and return home with a new goal of sharing the horrors they’d seen. Saving lives in besieged hospitals in Gaza in 2024 and after a so-called ceasefire was announced in early 2025 convinces them to take a public stand against Israeli’s genocide once they return home. In interviews, at conventions, and in the halls of Congress, they testify to what they’ve witnessed: the deliberate targeting of children, health care workers, and journalists by Israel.
The film pulls no punches in its condemnation of U.S. complicity in Israel’s attacks on Gazan civilians. As the film begins, one of the three titular doctors—Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon from North Carolina—shows Teng a photo of six dead babies, still in bloody bandages. Teng tells the doctor she wants to blur the graphic image in her film to “protect their dignity.”
“No,” says Perlmutter. “That’s the problem. Their bodies tell the story of this genocide.”
Perlmutter has witnessed tremendous suffering through his work, as have the two other physicians—Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon from California, and Dr. Thaer Ahmad, a Palestinian American emergency physician from Illinois. Collectively, they’ve volunteered at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan, New York, after the 9/11 attacks; in southern Zimbabwe and Ukraine; and in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. But nothing prepared them for Gaza, where infection control is impossible and even the best medical care can’t compete with daily bombardment.
The film provides ample evidence of deliberate attacks on the enclave’s health care system, as demonstrated by images of ambulances perforated with hundreds of bullet holes and mass graves behind Nasser Hospital in the south. As the doctors explain, the team faces all of the standard challenges of doing triage among multiple traumas, in addition to particularly gut-wrenching dynamics, such as medical workers treating their own children. The risk of a direct hit by Israeli forces on a hospital is constant. In the documentary, Sidhwa reflects on the obliteration of a ward at Nasser Hospital in August 2025: “That’s the first time I’ve ever done an operation on a patient who was blown up and then had him get blown up again in his hospital bed.”
Perlmutter and Sidhwa were working together at Nasser in March 2025 when a temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hamas collapsed. Israel has allowed Ahmad to enter Gaza only once, in 2024, and has refused his reentry five times since. Instead Ahmad carries his message to audiences in his home state of Illinois. In the film, he is shown speaking at a convention in Chicago, telling his audience that attacks on medical facilities and staff are illegal under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, but that Israel continues to violate those laws with impunity.
Ahmad explains Israel’s strategy of escalation, first bombing Al-Ahli Hospital and, after what he describes as a lack of accountability, conducting subsequent attacks on Al-Shifa, Al-Awda, Al-Aqsa, and Nasser hospitals. The World Health Organization reports that 94 percent of hospitals in Gaza have now been damaged or destroyed and many of their staff killed or kidnapped, including pediatrician Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who has been detained by Israel for the past twenty months. To this today, Ahmad points out, the American Medical Association refuses to hold Israel accountable or to demand the release of imprisoned medical personnel.
The most demonstrative of the three doctors, Perlmutter doesn’t hold back in interviews. “That’s why we’re a good pair: You talk intelligently and I talk emotionally,” he jokes with Sidhwa after a tense exchange with an interviewer on CNN International. They repeatedly describe the mainstream media’s censorship of what might be disturbing to pro-Israel viewers. But the doctors are reporting to the outside world what they have seen in Gaza—and sometimes what they haven’t seen, such as tunnels under hospitals, where Israel has claimed Hamas stores weapons. “There’s a reason,” Sidhwa points out to an Israeli interviewer, “why the only people who can find [images of tunnels] are Israeli military intelligence.”
Teng spends just enough time on the trio’s personal lives for viewers to get a sense of what drives them to keep risking their lives to care for Palestinians in Gaza. Perlmutter, the son of a doctor, tears up when he listens to a Palestinian colleague’s losses; Ahmad, father of two daughters, wants a more peaceful life for his children; Sidhwa, who is single, admits that his commitment to humanitarian service has caused tension in romantic relationships. Then he catches himself and laughs: “No, I’m just hard to get along with.”
At one point, the film features a crowd of children welcoming the doctors to Gaza, jumping, dancing, and cheering for the cameras. It then abruptly cuts to wounded children lying on a hospital floor. The film portrays Gaza as a kill zone where no child can play without risking injury or death. Perlmutter and Sidhwa are shown trying to save the legs and left arm of a ten-year-old girl who survived an Apache helicopter’s missile strike—as medics, journalists, and families in Gaza are no match for the murderous designs of a government determined to finish what it started in 1948.
Perlmutter sums up his advice for health care workers preparing to volunteer in Gaza: “The truth is, if we don’t bear witness and treat the genocide as a disease and go after the cause of that disease, we’re commiting medical malpractice. Genocide has to be considered a medical diagnosis. It can no longer be considered a political entity.”