US Press
A new documentary follows three American doctors through Gaza's hospitals
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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A documentary released this month follows three American physicians who volunteered in Gaza's hospitals and then found the harder audience waiting for them at home, the investigative outlet The Intercept reported on Friday.
The film, "American Doctor", is the feature directing debut of Poh Si Teng. It follows Thaer Ahmad, an emergency physician; Mark Perlmutter, an orthopaedic surgeon; and Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon — a Palestinian American, a Jewish American and a Zoroastrian American who found themselves describing the same wards.
Perlmutter and Sidhwa reached Gaza during the March 2025 window. Ahmad was refused entry by the Israeli authorities, a refusal he attributes to his Palestinian background. They don't have the materials that they need to serve their patients, Ahmad says of the doctors still inside.
What the reporting says about the reception#
The Intercept's Jonah Valdez writes that the second half of the story is the one American medicine has not reckoned with: physicians returning with first-hand accounts and being met by interviewers who framed what they had seen as extreme allegations, and who asked about Hamas obstructing aid while passing over the Israeli restrictions on what entered.
The piece sets the doctors' testimony against the running counts — at least 70,000 people killed since October 2023 and about 171,000 wounded, more than 1,200 killed since the October 2025 ceasefire took effect, and between 15,000 and 18,000 patients who need to leave Gaza for treatment they cannot receive inside it.
Palestinian medical workers have made these arguments since the first winter of the war, and have made them from inside the buildings being struck. The documentary's contribution is not new evidence. It is a record of what happened when three American colleagues said the same sentences in an American studio.
