Mark Perlmutter has treated patients hit by natural disasters and conflicts across 30 countries, including in his home nation, the United States. But nothing prepared him for the horrors he would witness under Israeli bombardment.
“Just our first week in Gaza was worse than all of my experiences combined,” the orthopaedic surgeon said of deployments that included the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in New York and Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana in the United States, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
The suffering Perlmutter and his colleagues have seen in Gaza hospitals since Israel launched its military campaign in retaliation for the October 2023 Hamas attack forms the core of the documentary American Doctor. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
In her documentary debut, director Poh Si Teng makes no attempt to explain the rights or wrongs of the conflict itself, focusing instead on the work of three American doctors in Gaza from different backgrounds. Perlmutter is Jewish; Thaer Ahmad is a Muslim of Palestinian descent; and Feroze Sidhwa is the son of Zoroastrian parents.
“People feel like they have to have a PhD in this topic to understand it, or to discuss it sensibly,” Sidhwa, a general, trauma and critical care surgeon, said.
“The question isn’t how well you know Arab-Israeli history. The question is: Do you or do you not support the murder of children? Do you or do you not support the torture of physicians? Do you or do you not support the bombing of hospitals?”
The Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 killed 1,221 people. Israel’s military response has resulted in more than 73,300 deaths in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry.
Israel acknowledges it has intentionally hit medical facilities, but says it is targeting Hamas fighters using tunnels underneath those hospitals. The three doctors in the documentary say they have not seen tunnels in any of the hospitals where they have worked in Gaza.
One of the documentary’s most harrowing sections shows a “double-tap” where Israeli missiles strike first responders who are treating patients following a previous bombing at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, a city in the southern Gaza Strip, Palestine, almost entirely destroyed by bombardment.
Deciding what to show on screen was a challenge for Teng, who has previously worked as a visual journalist for Agence France-Presse and other outlets.
“You show too much, and it’s gratuitous, and nobody’s gonna watch, and you want to be effective in telling the truth. You show too little, and it’s not real,” she said.
The film begins with precisely this dilemma. When Teng feels that including a photo of dead children violates their dignity, Perlmutter chides her, insisting that their obligation is to show Americans what their tax dollars are funding.
“Israel took away their dignity,” he says. “You’re not dignifying them unless you let their memory, their bodies tell the story of this trauma, of this genocide. You’re not doing them a service by not showing that,” he says, pointing to the photo.
“It was a moment for me where, you know what, there’s no halfway in this,” Teng said.
For the three doctors in the documentary, having to endlessly reiterate the “urgency” of the situation in Gaza during media interviews or meetings with members of US Congress is frustrating.
“If I tell you that there are kids starving, or if I tell you that there are mothers who are struggling to feed their children, or that there are teenagers who are being killed by these massive bombs, your response should be: ‘We have to stop this,’” emergency doctor Thaer Ahmad said.
“I should not hear from you: ‘Oh, but what were they doing, or where were they, or what background are they from? What religion do they follow, or where were they born?’”
Teng said she frequently encountered this resistance, and at times found it difficult to get funding for the project as donors shied away from putting cash behind a project showing the damage being done by US-funded Israeli munitions.
But, she said, the moment felt like it was changing, and she hoped “American Doctor” might further shift the narrative.
It’s a hope Perlmutter shares. “The avalanche of truth starts with snowflakes,” he said. “I’m optimistic that we’re all snowflakes in that snowball that’s getting bigger and bigger.”
