NPR Reports Glowingly on ‘American Doctor’

On August 24, NPR’s Leila Fadel reported on a new “documentary” about three American doctors who spent time treating patients in Gaza at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis. It opens with a description of six dead children, including babies, lined up at the hospital, so that viewers are properly horrified from the get-go, then it immediately switches to interviews with the three doctors — a Muslim, a Zoroastrian, and a Jew — who in turn report on the horrors they experienced. It is the Jewish doctor, Mark Perlmutter, who is given the most air time. He casually accuses Israel of “genocide” and compares the IDF to Nazis. This atrocious film is now making the rounds of film festivals, and no doubt will be welcomed as the Picture of the Year for all those consumed with anti-Israel bloodlust. More on this propaganda film can be found here: “A documentary should present evidence, not selectively edit reality to fit a political narrative,” Creative Community for Peace, July 23, 2026:

American Doctor asks viewers to accept sweeping accusations against Israel while omitting critical facts: the featured doctors’ longstanding anti-Israel activism, Hamas’s documented use of Gaza’s hospitals, U.S. intelligence findings, hostage testimony, independent reporting, and even Palestinian witnesses who exposed Hamas’s abuse of medical facilities.

Before accepting the film’s narrative, take a look at everything it chose to leave out.

AMERICAN DOCTOR – A TALE OF LIES
A documentary about Gaza’s hospitals asks audiences to accept a sweeping verdict while withholding facts that directly challenge its narrative.

Before you accept the film’s conclusions, examine what the film chose to leave out.

THE SUFFERING WAS REAL. THE STORY IS MISINFORMED.
Gaza’s hospitals treated horrific casualties under difficult conditions. The war in Gaza was a brutal urban war launched by Hamas on October 7 on a battlefield the terror group created to maximize civilian casualties.

While these doctors can describe wounds, shortages, and what they personally witnessed, the film whitewashes who these doctors were and their deep-seated biases.

THE FILM FOLLOWS THESE ACTIVIST DOCTORS AND CALLS IT EVIDENCE
No military experts.
No hostage testimony.
No serious examination of Hamas inside Gaza’s hospitals.

The project’s own materials call it a “political and medical thriller,” with no sit-down interviews or expert commentary, just manipulated pieces of footage. In other words, an edited tale of fiction.

Its official synopsis follows the doctors from Gaza to the halls of Congress, creating an air of credibility where there is none.

WHO ARE THESE THREE DOCTORS?
THAER AHMAD WAS A PALESTINIAN ACTIVIST LONG BEFORE THE WAR
Ahmad’s political involvement did not begin after a hospital mission.
● He first traveled to Gaza in 2009.
● He returned repeatedly.
● He serves on the board of the Palestinian American Medical Association, an organization with a long history of anti-Israel activism.
● He publicly campaigned against U.S. support for Israel.
● He walked out of a White House meeting in an intentional act of activist protest.

The film presents his politics as the natural result of what he witnessed. His advocacy had deep roots long before October 7.

FEROZE SIDHWA’S ANTI-ISRAEL ACTIVISM GOES BACK TWO DECADES
Sidhwa publicly portrayed himself as an American with no connection to the conflict.

His record tells a different story.
● He spent extended periods in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
● He wrote anti-Israel pieces as early as 2007.
● He helped edit multiple works by anti-Israel conspiracy theorist Norman Finkelstein.
● He later appeared on Iran’s state-run Press TV.

Far from a disinterested medic who wandered into a war zone, he is a lifelong anti-Israel activist with a deep religious conviction and a paper trail stretching back nearly two decades. He then mounted a carefully orchestrated campaign to launder himself into the mainstream.

He arrived in Gaza with an established ideological position. The film hides all of this.

MARK PERLMUTTER’S VERDICT CAME BEFORE THE WOUNDS

Perlmutter treated horrific injuries, but he described Gaza as worse than all the disaster zones he had previously encountered combined. There is only one problem: he had never served in a war zone.

According to his own résumé, he had served only in disaster zones affected by events such as hurricanes and earthquakes.

Perlmutter had never seen war up close, let alone how a terrorist group like Hamas fights its wars. Yet he emerged from his first experience in an active war zone making sweeping allegations of genocide, deliberate child murder, and systematic Israeli criminality, claims that extended far beyond anything his clinical observations could establish.

His public statements further call his objectivity into question. On X, Perlmutter equated Zionism with Nazism and claimed that Hamas affiliates constituted just 0.01% of Gaza’s population—roughly 200 people—despite estimates placing Hamas’s armed force alone in the tens of thousands….

Everyone in Gaza knew that Hamas had taken control of its hospitals, using parts of them to hide their men and weapons. The Hamas men also used several of the hospitals to hold anti-Hamas Gazans, who were interrogated and tortured. One of those was Nasser Hospital, where the three doctors worked and the “documentary” was made. It beggars belief for the doctors to insist that Hamas had no presence in Nasser Hospital.

At no point in the film did its director, or the three doctors, all of whom repeatedly charged Israel with “genocide,” ever discuss the essential element — “intent” — required to prove genocide. None of them discussed the tremendous effort the IDF made to limit Gazan casualties, by dropping millions of leaflets, sending millions of text messages, and making millions of robocalls, all in order to warn civilians away areas about to be targeted. Nor do the three doctors mention Hamas’ deliberate policy to embed its men among civilians who were then used as hostages; their deaths would then be used, as in the movie American Doctor, as anti-Israel propaganda.

Poh Si Teng, the director of this film, previously worked for Qatar’s broadcasting giant, Al Jazeera, faithfully following its anti-Israel and pro-Hamas line.

All three doctors have for years been anti-Israel activists. They came to Gaza with their minds made up: Israel was evil, genocidal, as bad as or possibly even worse than, the Nazis. The doctors worked at only one hospital —Nasser Hospital — that was crawling with Hamas fighters, stored weapons, and Gazan dissidents who were tortured inside the hospital, but apparently they saw none of this.

Of course, the director could have mentioned this use of Nasser Hospital, to correct the narrative offered by the doctors. But she did not.

She could have discussed the actual number of civilian deaths that the IDF caused in Gaza. We know that of the 73,000 dead, at least 30,000 were Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters. Of the 43,000 remaining, about 800 — using historical data from before the war — have died each month in Gaza from causes unrelated to the war, from diseases (cancer, heart disease) and accidents. Let’s do the math: over the 35 months of the Gaza war, a total of 28,000 people died from diseases and accidents. That leaves 15,000 civilians dead as a result of the war. Finally, it is known that a number of missiles and rockets fired by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) fell short, landing inside Gaza, where some of them struck and killed civilians. That was the case, for example, at the Al-Shifa Hospital, where a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket aimed at Israel fell into the hospital’s parking lot. The Gaza Health Ministry said that 471 Gazans died from that one rocket. In the 35 months since the Gaza War began, it seems reasonable to estimate that 2000 Gazans have died from misfired Hamas and PIJ missiles and rockets. That would mean 13,000 civilians in Gaza — men, women, and children — have died as a result of IDF activity. We are told in American Doctor that tens of thousands of children were killed in the Gaza war. It’s nonsense. Nonsense like so much of this enraging propaganda film posing as a “documentary” that will no doubt be coming, alas, to a theatre near you.