Poh Si Teng couldn’t bear the silence as the Israeli government killed hundreds of Palestinian journalists in Gaza. Some were her former colleagues at Al Jazeera, where Teng had been a documentary commissioner—yet the American news media remained, as she put it, “pin-drop” silent.

So Teng emptied her life savings to make American Doctor, which follows three American physicians— Mark Perlmutter, Feroze Sidhwa, and Thaer Ahmad—a Jewish, Zoroastrian, and Palestinian Muslim trio. They set out to Gaza in March 2025, though Ahmad is turned away by Israeli border guards and never gets in.

Sidhwa and Perlmutter treat patients with limited equipment (and often without painkillers) in the half-destroyed Nasser Hospital and bonding with their Palestinian colleagues, many of whom are working even as their own family members are killed.

The film opens with an argument between Teng and Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon, in Perlmutter’s home in North Carolina. He shows her a photo of six Palestinian babies, lined up in a row. They’ve all been killed.

Teng will pixelate the image—or not use it at all—to respect the children’s dignity, she explains. Perlmutter, angry, calls that journalistic malpractice. It’s a question that underlies the entire project: how do you keep a story of mass murder both human and unflinching in its refusal to hide from the destruction American tax dollars have wrought?

The doctors encounter firsthand evidence that Israeli forces are systematically targeting children: Sidhwa, who spoke with Mother Jones in 2024, saw children shot in the head “nearly every day” at Nasser and the Gaza European Hospital. Returning to the United States, they join Ahmad on another Sisyphean mission: trying to make US lawmakers understand the horrors they’ve seen.

I interviewed Teng about her new film, out now, and what she hopes audiences will........

© Mother Jones