Valerie Zink, a Canadian photojournalist who has worked as a stringer for Reuters for the past eight years, has resigned in the aftermath of yesterday’s Israeli “double-tap” strike on the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, which killed 20 people, including five journalists. “At this point it’s become impossible for me to maintain a relationship with Reuters given its role in justifying and enabling the systematic assassination of 245 journalists in Gaza,” she wrote in a statement posted on her Facebook page. “I owe my colleagues in Palestine at least this much, and so much more.”
She noted that when Israel murdered Al Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif and his entire crew in Gaza City on Aug. 10, “Reuters chose to publish Israel’s entirely baseless claim that Al-Sharif was a Hamas operative—one of countless lies that media outlets like Reuters have dutifully repeated and dignified. Reuters’ willingness to perpetuate Israel’s propaganda has not spared their own reporters from Israel’s genocide.”
“Western media is directly culpable for creating the conditions in which this can happen,” Zink charged. “By repeating Israel’s genocidal fabrications without determining if they have any credibility—willfully abandoning the most basic responsibility of journalism—Western media outlets have made possible the killing of more journalists in two years on one tiny strip of land than in WWI, WWII, and the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, and Ukraine combined, to say nothing of starving an entire population, shredding its children, and burning people alive. …
