Screenshot of Christiane Amanpour introducing her interview with the two doctors from the “American Doctor” documentary on her CNN show, Aug. 19, 2026.
Dr. Mark Perlmutter, featured alongside Dr. Thaer Ahmad and Dr. Feroze Sidhwa in the documentary American Doctor, accused the “Zionist government of Israel” of executing a “final solution” through the intentional murder of children and journalists on Christiane Amanpour’s CNN show on Aug. 19, 2026.
“This is all part of the genocide,” Dr. Perlmutter claimed, describing it as an “orchestrated, well-planned, three-dimensional chess game… to destroy a population of people simply so they can have their land.”
Rather than directly contradicting his use of visceral Holocaust terminology and his unfounded accusation of genocide, Amanpour premised her question on his asserted Jewish identity, asking how mindful he was of using such language. Perlmutter immediately corrected her, clarifying that he is agnostic and merely possesses “Jewish heritage.”
Amanpour did not even push back when Dr. Perlmutter maligned American and Israeli militaries as “the real terrorists,” moving on to question Dr. Sidhwa. Instead, she said these doctors offered “crucial” testimony from Gaza, with “international journalists still barred by Israel from entering.”
The sole moment when Amanpour disputed Dr. Perlmutter was when he criticized legacy media, including CNN, for having “closed ears” when the doctors tried “to report the truth.”
Having previously interviewed Dr. Perlmutter and Sidhwa in July 2024, Amanpour was already familiar with their rhetoric. In that earlier appearance, Perlmutter accused Israeli snipers of purposefully targeting children. He offered no evidence regarding shooter identities, circumstances, or ballistics. In this second broadcast, he repeated the allegation, adding journalists to the target list, again without journalistic challenge from the host.
The interview was premised on reported spikes in Israeli “attacks” against healthcare workers, sourced from the NGO Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) and the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza. Amanpour offered no transparency about either entity she cited. She omitted that MAP engages in anti-Israel advocacy rather than operating as an impartial medical charity, and that Hamas runs the health ministry. Amanpour’s own framing suggested that Israel intentionally targets healthcare workers, yet she failed to mention in the entire segment the volumes of evidence illustrating how Hamas exploits the hospitals’ humanitarian status for its own terror agenda, using sick, disabled, and pregnant Gazans as well as medical workers as human shields.
Failing to challenge Holocaust inversion
Amanpour failed to explain that “final solution” was the Nazi term for the systematic destruction of European Jewry, nor did she note that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) designates this inversion of perpetrator and victim as antisemitic.
As scholars such as former U.S. Special Envoy Deborah Lipstadt observe, Holocaust inversion functions as “soft-core Holocaust denial,” weaponizing the Shoah to impose a uniquely onerous moral stricture on Jews.
This rhetorical tactic far predates Israeli state policy. As historian Robert Wistrich documented in his book “A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism From Antiquity to the Global Jihad,” British Mandate officials like Sir Harold MacMichael and Sir Edward Grigg routinely compared Zionism to Nazism during World War II while the Nazis were actively mass-murdering European Jews. In March 1945, High Commissioner Lord Gort similarly warned London that a Jewish state would mean the “rebirth of National Socialism.” This rhetoric contributed to the British policy of blocking Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors from entering Palestine, decades before it was later weaponized as Soviet Cold War anti-Zionist propaganda after 1967, as the USSR aligned itself with the Arab league. Historically, every state that has codified anti-Zionism into official policy has ultimately targeted its own Jewish population.
Documentary tokenization
The promotional campaign for American Doctor advertises the film as following “three prominent physicians—Palestinian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian—who, despite their differences, are friends bound by a shared oath to save lives.” However, framing Dr. Perlmutter as a “Jewish doctor,” despite his explicit clarification that he is an agnostic with Jewish heritage, raises serious questions regarding editorial intent and tokenization.
While CAMERA verified his paternal Jewish lineage, public obituaries and family records document a maternal background and close relatives tied strictly to Roman Catholic institutions and non-Jewish burials. While many people can and do identify as Jewish with all these background details, he did not. Framing him as a Jewish surrogate to fit a clean marketing narrative compromises the film’s credibility.
Hamas use of hospitals
The physicians featured in the film, who have conducted an extensive media tour across MS NOW, NPR, CBS News, BBC, and Qatari-state owned Al Jazeera English, volunteered at facilities including Nasser Hospital, European Gaza Hospital, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, and Al-Shifa Hospital. All three doctors have denied any Hamas presence at any hospital where they worked. This blanket denial directly contradicts extensive forensic, military, and testimonial evidence.
Nasser Hospital
Released Israeli hostage Sharon Alony Cunio testified in a January 2024 Associated Press interview that at one point, Nasser Hospital held nearly 30 hostages. During a February 2024 raid on the hospital, Israeli soldiers detained about 200 suspected terrorists and found boxes of sealed medicines with the names of Israeli hostages on them and large quantities of weapons.
In February 2026, Doctors Without Borders suspended some work at the hospital due to the presence of armed, masked men. The IDF then said in August 2026 that Hamas has been using the hospital to interrogate and torture Palestinians.
European Gaza Hospital
On May 13, 2025, an Israeli strike targeted a command compound directly beneath the hospital, killing Mohammed Sinwar (head of Hamas’s military wing) and Rafah Brigade commander Mohammad Shabana. Israeli forces subsequently uncovered weapons, ammunition, cash, and subterranean infrastructure, offering international journalists tours of the tunnels beneath the medical complex.
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital
On Oct. 14, 2024, the IDF targeted a Hamas command center that was on the premises of al-Aqsa Martyr’s Hospital. The military said terrorists had been using the command center to “plan and execute terrorist attacks” against soldiers and Israel. On July 6, 2026, Hamas officials held a press conference outside the hospital’s emergency room. Gazan political activist Amin Abed included Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital as one of the places where Hamas has been summoning people for interrogation and torture in a June 2026 interview. He also listed Al-Shifa Hospital, Nasser Hospital, and Al-Ma’amdani/Al-Ahli Hospital.
Al-Shifa Hospital
Hamas terrorists murdered Cpl. Noa Marciano at Al-Shifa Hospital in November 2023, after the terrorist group took her hostage on Oct. 7, 2023. The IDF said at the time that Hamas had also brought two other hostages to the hospital and revealed a 55 meter-long tunnel below the Shifa compound.
In early January 2024, the U.S. declassified and released intelligence assessments that it had “high confidence” that Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad used Al-Shifa Hospital for military command, weapon storage, and holding hostages. The White House referred to this intelligence publicly as early as Nov. 14, 2023.
In March 2024, the IDF conducted a two-week battle at the hospital that resulted in the capture of over 800 terrorists and suspects and the killing of nearly 200.
In footage of the IDF interrogation, the spokesperson for Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), Tariq Salami Otha Abu Shlouf, revealed that Hamas and PIJ operate out of “all of the hospitals” while discussing the terrorist organizations’ public relations strategy.
It seems highly unlikely, given all this evidence, that none of the doctors saw any indication that Hamas operated from the same hospitals where they volunteered. Oddly, Amanpour did not ask them a single question about this, even though the fact that Hamas has been operating from hospitals is central to the entire context of why the IDF raided them.
Amanpour also failed to disclose that Dr. Sidhwa has had a long history of anti-Israel activism long before the 2023-2025 war in Gaza, concealing that he is not an impartial medical worker.
The charges Dr. Perlmutter and Dr. Sidhwa leveled against Israel, both in the interview and the documentary, are the most severe accusations against a nation and therefore, should require unassailable proof to back them up. Since Amanpour never asked for evidence, she permitted them to air unvetted propaganda to her audience, marking a remarkable abdication of journalistic responsibility.