New Documentary Follows U.S. Doctors Through Gaza's Bombed Hospitals as Death Toll Among Medical Staff Nears 1,700

A new documentary is putting American faces and voices behind the destruction of Gaza's hospital system, at a moment when Palestinian officials say Israeli attacks have killed roughly 1,700 healthcare workers since October 2023.

"American Doctor," the subject of an August 14 Democracy Now! interview, follows three U.S. physicians who volunteered in Gaza's hospitals during the war: orthopedic surgeon Dr. Mark Perlmutter, trauma surgeon Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, and emergency physician Dr. Thaer Ahmad, who is Palestinian American.

In the film's trailer, Sidhwa describes working alongside two other surgeons on a young girl for two and a half hours, an operation he says will likely still cost her both legs and an arm. Perlmutter recounts a 15-year-old patient, ready for discharge, killed in a strike. Ahmad describes DHS detaining him upon his return to the United States, a claim made directly by Ahmad in the trailer and not independently verified in the available record.

"A pattern," not an accident

In a clip aired on Democracy Now!, Ahmad tells viewers that hospital strikes have become a Israeli military pattern dating to October 2023, when Israeli forces struck Al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital, an incident widely documented by international media and human rights groups at the time. The documentary's throughline is that this is not incidental damage but a repeated targeting of medical infrastructure, a characterization consistent with extensive reporting by the World Health Organization, the United Nations and groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch over the course of the war.

Sidhwa, who says in the trailer he has no personal or religious tie to the conflict, frames the film's stakes in blunt terms: the United States supplies the jet fuel and bombs that make the campaign possible, and he argues Americans "do not have to accept that" as a matter of policy. That U.S. military aid, including munitions and fuel, underpins Israeli operations is documented and publicly acknowledged by the U.S. government, not in dispute.

Why a filmmaker who covered Al Jazeera made this

Director Poh Si Teng, a former Al Jazeera journalist, told Democracy Now! the film grew out of "deep despair," including grief over Israeli strikes that killed former colleagues at the network. She said her goal was to "bring Palestine back to the United States," using the doctors as a bridge for American audiences who may otherwise see the war only through statistics.

That framing matters because the doctors themselves come from starkly different starting points. Perlmutter says in the trailer that as a Jewish physician he arrived believing, like "most Americans," that Gazans were "nothing but terrorists." His account of what he saw, and his decision to say so on camera, is presented by the filmmakers as evidence that firsthand exposure to the hospitals changed his understanding of the war.

The film does not claim to be a comprehensive accounting of the health worker death toll or of individual strikes; it is built around testimony and footage from three physicians' deployments. But as documentary evidence, it adds firsthand medical testimony to a record already built by health ministries, the UN and rights organizations documenting the systematic collapse of Gaza's hospital system under Israeli bombardment.