American Doctor: Gaza’s Healers Under Siege
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- Poh Si Teng directed 'American Doctor,' a documentary self-financed with $150,000 from her savings after leaving ABC News, centering on American doctors volunteering at Gaza’s Nasser Medical Complex.
- Dr. Mark Perlmutter, a Jewish physician, confronts the moral weight of treating Palestinian patients in Gaza, drawing parallels to his father’s work in Holocaust-era concentration camps.
- Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a Zoroastrian trauma surgeon from Pakistan, finds peace only while operating in Gaza, where he witnesses a child killed in his hospital bed after surgery.
- Dr. Thaer Ahmad, a Palestinian-American emergency physician, is denied re-entry to Gaza due to his heritage and family ties in the West Bank, highlighting bureaucratic exclusion rooted in Israel’s ID system.
- Nasser Medical Complex becomes a symbol of targeted violence, with Teng closing the film on a montage of Israeli attacks, including a double-tap drone strike after filming ended.
- Teng chooses not to blur images of dead children despite initial hesitation, following Dr. Perlmutter’s insistence that concealing them dishonors their memory.
Why it matters: The film exposes how even highly capable medical professionals are constrained by geopolitical violence and systemic bias—Dr. Ahmad’s denied entry underscores how identity shapes access and action, while the targeting of hospitals erodes medical neutrality protected under the Geneva Convention.
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