American Doctor

Ralph speaks to Dr. Feroze Sidhwa for an update on the death toll in Gaza as well as the new documentary film “American Doctor.” Then Ralph and economic William Lazonick discuss Nvidia’s planned $235 billion stock buyback.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa is a general, trauma, and critical care surgeon in California. He is also a humanitarian surgeon who has worked in Palestine, Ukraine, Haiti, Zimbabwe, and Burkina Faso. He most recently volunteered at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, Gaza. He was blocked from entering Gaza by Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence service in November 2025. His work in Gaza is featured in the new documentary film American Doctor.
If I’m remembering the exact time right, March of 2016 was the deadliest month for children that [Airwars] had ever studied anywhere—so that’s the 31 days of March of 2016. In the first 25 days of the US-Israeli assault on Gaza, the rate of killing of children was 71 to 142 times higher than in the deadliest month they had ever studied for children anywhere else. And just to put these numbers in a little bit of perspective…If you look at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine versus Israel’s invasion of Gaza, Russian forces killed the same percentage of children in Ukraine in 10 months as the US and Israel kill in Gaza every 18 to 37 hours.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
I want to emphasize to people that [American Doctor] is not a gory movie. This movie is nothing— Saving Private Ryan is a much bloodier movie than this. But nevertheless, this movie is a tough watch sometimes because the things you see (like what [Dr. Mark Perlmutter] shows at the very beginning) are difficult. They are scenes of dead bodies—not bodies that have been ripped to shreds, but bodies that are just dead. And it forces you to realize what our bombs do to people. You know, our bombs are not made of magic and pixie dust. They cause pressure waves, they cause blast injuries, they cause all sorts of death and destruction. And in that opening scene that’s what Mark is trying to get the director [Poh Si Teng] to understand—that if she blurs these images, if she pixelates them, if she refuses to show people what it looks like to kill children and what dead children actually look like and force people to look (to really just look), that she’ll be doing people a disservice. And you hear it at the end of the trailer when he’s saying “People have a right to know the truth.” Well, the truth is pretty uncomfortable.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
The most effective medical care that human beings provide to each other is provided to small children so that they can reach the age of five (at that point they become a bit more robust and they can survive the challenges that the world throws at them) and to pregnant women. Those are the two groups that benefit most from medical care. When you destroy a medical system…This is literally every hospital in Gaza, and not just the hospitals. Most of the clinics have been destroyed. Most of the pharmaceutical warehouses have been destroyed. Most of the veterinary medicine spots have been destroyed. So when you attack a health care system like this, you’re basically condemning women and children to die. There’s no other effect that it could even be expected to have. The same goes with the destruction of Gaza’s sewage system, it’s the destruction of its educational system, the destruction of the water treatment facilities, the destruction of almost all of the housing in Gaza, the destruction of the entire arable land and food distribution system, the destruction of almost every bakery in Gaza, the destruction of every chicken farm, it just goes on and on and on. Everything that sustains life, especially for an urbanized population, has been destroyed. And that’s why the vast majority of international experts consider this to be genocidal.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
William Lazonick is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and co-founder and president of the Academic-Industry Research Netw...