‘American Doctor’ Review: An Unflinching Chronicle of Three Courageous US Physicians Who Volunteered in Gaza

It’s hard to make a documentary about the war in Gaza that doesn’t feel overtly political. And yet director Poh Si Teng’s unflinching new exposé, American Doctoris first and foremost a humanitarian story — one in which medicine and moral decency take precedence over partisanship.

Which isn’t to say that this very hands-on look at three American physicians volunteering in Gaza isn’t also a political statement. By its very existence — and in what it reveals about the IDF’s killing, maiming and wounding of Palestinian civilians over the past few years — the film is a condemnation both of Netanyahu’s far-right war machine and the US government’s steadfast support of it.

But what makes American Doctor stand out is how it eschews the bigger picture to focus primarily on the practical, and often hard-to-watch, reality of surgeons trying to save lives in the operating room. When children are brought into the ER after surviving a bombing, their suffering is unbearable to witness no matter what side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict you find yourself on.

The trio of doctors featured in Si Teng’s movie not only deal with such atrocities firsthand as physicians; they speak about them candidly in interviews, describing what they’ve seen and the dire working conditions they face. (One of them has to smuggle basic supplies like scrubs and antibiotics in his luggage since the IDF won’t allow them into the combat zone.) The doctors’ efforts involve both medical interventions and relaying information to the outside world, because Israel has barred foreign journalists from Gaza since October 2023.

All three physicians have distinct skill sets and hail from widely different backgrounds. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa is a trauma surgeon from California whose Zoroastrian parents emigrated to the US from Pakistan. The North Carolina-based Dr. Mark Perlmutter is a Jewish orthopedic surgeon who hardly conceals his contempt for the current Israeli regime (he lashes out at them as “chicken fuckers,” which must be a Southern thing). And Dr. Thaer Ahmad is a Palestinian-American ER specialist who speaks with a heavy Chicago accent as he gives public talks about his experience.

What they have in common is volunteering their services and expertise in Gaza, which is no small feat when you consider how their own lives were at stake. Si Teng shows us not one but two scenes of the facility where they work — the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis — getting blasted by IDF missiles. In the second, an initial attack on the hospital is followed by several more bombs that obliterate a crew of Palestinian Red Crescent workers trying to save the wounded.

“As Surgeons, We Have Never Seen Such Cruelty Like Israel’s Genocide in Gaza,” is the title of an op-ed piece Sidhwa and Perlmutter pen together, and American Doctor does not spare the viewer some of that cruelty. We see bloodied, unconscious children being carted into the operating room, where some of them are saved and some aren’t. (And even when they are saved, their limbs are sometimes amputated.) One 15-year-old boy survives a bombing, only to be “incinerated” (these are Sidhwa’s words) when the Nasser complex takes a direct hit from a missile.

There is nothing to do but watch these scenes in horror and disgust. Thankfully, Si Teng also spends some time with the doctors when they’re off-duty and palling around with their Palestinian colleagues, revealing a MASH-like camaraderie among combat physicians who have been through the worst. Other sequences show the trio of volunteers back home in the US, where they give more interviews, spend time with their loved ones and prepare for their return to Gaza.

These scenes emphasize the “American” part of the film’s title, and Si Teng smartly frames her film from that point of view. The doctors know their actions will have little impact on Israeli policy — a policy that includes making it incredibly difficult for them to enter Gaza and do their jobs. (After volunteering there in 2024, Ahmad is denied access and remains grounded in neighboring Jordan.) But the trio does try to make an impact on politics back home, including paying a visit to the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington for meetings during which they mostly receive lip service.

One of the most frustrating things in American Doctor is to see the US government doing little to quell the devastation and suffering it shares a responsibility in. Despite the doctors’ multiple efforts to push America to “achieve its moral potential,” as Sidhwa states at one point, the bombs and missiles — supplied in large part by the US military — keep raining down and the kids keep on dying. By the time the movie ends, Gaza is in ruins and too many lives have been lost.

Like the courageous men she chronicles, Si Teng faces these realities with an impressive level of sangfroid, filming with a steady hand and never shying away from some truly shocking images. Her one misstep is at the very end of the film, when she inserts a montage of explosions, corpses and destruction that’s meant to jar us awake, but hardly feels necessary considering all we’ve seen.

It’s perhaps too obvious and blatantly political, whereas what makes American Doctor so powerful is the way it reveals the shared humanity of physicians and patients in the face of death.