Can you talk about your work in this film and particularly your efforts to talk about it in America or to the media? What you saw as an eyewitness, really?

Sure.

I mean, this is a pretty simple answer that your question provides a segue for.

Whether I'm dealing with a single patient with a gunshot wound, it's my job to advocate for that patient.

My job is to tell the truth, report what I observe.

And if I have to share that with authorities for the defense or prosecution of that patient, that's what's necessary.

Truth telling is mandatory.

Like, could you give us like some perspective on like the denial of like very basic medical necessities in Gaza? I

How do those compare to the reality of what you saw in Gaza day in and day out when you were there?

Those children were put on the ambulance alive.

And those are the children that we stepped over to get to the ones that we could save.

And so not pixelating the most intact children.

um that weren't bleeding um i thought would do the american public at this service mostly because at this point we had approached every single legacy american media station we were shut down live from gaza by cnn and every other news station that was allowed well, none were allowed in.

And that was part of the story.

And we're taking bullets out of denizen Palestinian press workers that were specifically targeted.

So I'm really, I'm curious about how you navigate other people's interest with your own points of view and what you're all trying to accomplish as a team.

Mark Pearl- Perlmutter, that you were also activists?

Uh, w- we be- we evolved into activists.

We were there when the World Central Kitchen vans got destroyed on our first trip.

Fairouz and I were together.

Um, and I had contacted Chuck Schumer's office, called his office, spoke to it four times from Gaza, contacted American embassies, there's two in Israel, on four different occasions to try to seek help because we had a dozen Americans in our troop and I wanted to secure their safety 'cause we were gonna drive on the same road with the same permission from Israel, uh, in a couple of weeks then come back home, and I didn't want a missile through our van, the roof of our van either.

Um, I got no response from Chuck Schumer's office.

Uh, I got no response from the American embassy.

Let's just play this.

Uh, Marc, what are your feelings as you digest this news?

I, I personally think that this is, uh, part of the Israeli government's, quote, final solution, uh, close quote, for the Palestinian.

Um, you know, the, the Zionistic government of Israel, uh, is simply boiling down to, "I want their land, and I'm willing to kill their children to get it." Uh, killing the press, uh, and I've had press reporters, uh, uh, that I've operated on there for, uh, high velocity gunshot wounds that were, they were deliberately targeted by snipers.

Um, the absolute deliberate chil- uh, killing of children.

I personally have seen children shot in both the chest and the head.

Um, uh, are all designed to destroy the population.

The destruction of their food supply, the recent destruction of medical supplies in one of the four remaining hospitals, um, the adoption of software programs, uh, that were authored in the United States to follow children home to their, uh, from the playground to their home so they can blow up the entire apartment building with a 2,000 pound bomb.

Mark Po- Perlmutter? That you were also activists.

[laughs]

And it's, sorry, Froze, he has a Ducati.

[laughs] And we polished them up with steel wool and put points on them, and we use that as wires to fix fractures in kids.

Um, no such luxury in Gaza.

And in fact, I w- the night that the ceasefire broke, I was at a hospital that, um, usually when you put a screw in a bone, you drill a hole first and then put a screw into that hole.

I fixed a elbow fracture on a kid, and the only thing that we had left were the drill bits, and I left the drill bits in his, sticking out of his elbow to fix his fracture.

Uh, there wasn't any other metal, uh, nothing to fix another fracture.

It all just seems like a very maddening situation.

Talk about your father's influence.

Dad was a doc in World War II, Jewish.

A lot of Jewish doctors were assigned at the end of World War II to evacuate concentration camps and death camps.

That's what he did.

He collected photographs and I have those photographs.

And so that was a big influence on me.

He and I never really sat down and talked about it.

But any stories like that just for the audience that maybe we didn't get to see in the film?

I picked him up and I looked on one side of his head and he had a bullet entry wound on the back of his skull that, uh, that came out on the other side towards the back of his head.

So it's not just a random sniper, or it's not a rogue soldier that lost their ethics.

It's widespread throughout the entire Gaza Strip.

I was wrong.

Would you accept it as credible if dozens of US doctors said there was a pattern at US, uh, of children being targeted by the Israeli military?

But Mark was about to get a crash course from one of his fellow doctors.

We got on the van, and I heard Feroze talking casually to somebody else.

He's got this deep baritone voice.

And you know, you, you meet somebody for the first time, and within minutes you can tell that somebody's a whole lot smarter than you.

[laughs] And my first message was, "There's absolutely no way that I'm gonna get on this van and not sit next to this dude or behind him or within earshot of him."

He vividly remembered the day he saw two kids brought in who had both been shot in the head and the chest.

One of the kids was there with a, a family member.

I ripped up his shirt, and there was a, a, a, a bullet entry wound right over the heart, and then I picked up the dressings on his, uh, forehead, and a second bullet went in right in front of his left ear hole, in front of his ear and out of his neck.

Can you talk about what's happening, and particularly about the medical staff, the doctors, the nurses, the staff, um, those, for example, who have been arrested by Israel, even one, I understand, who you've talked to who was recently released?

Right.

Um, I have a colleague, an orthopedic surgeon, uh, that specializes in pediatric orthopedics, who was abducted, uh, from the hospital from the operating room in February of 2024.

He was just released.

When he was arrested, he was strip-searched, uh, marched naked in front of his colleagues, um, beaten on a daily basis in an Israeli prison, uh, beaten more intensely when he asked to speak to a lawyer, and even more intensely after he spoke to his lawyer.

Um, he had his fingers broken in his hand.

He had, while handcuffs on, guards step on the handcuffs to torque them into the nerves of his hand, ruining the nerves in his operative hands.

A civil lawsuit?