Veteran Reuters stringer, Valerie Zink, resigns over agency’s Gaza coverage, citing “complicity in Journalist killings”

A Canadian photojournalist who has worked as a stringer for Reuters for the past eight years has publicly resigned, condemning the news agency’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza and its handling of the killing of journalists.

In a strongly worded statement, Valerie Zink — whose work has been published by The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and other major outlets across North America, Europe, and Asia — said it had become “impossible” to maintain a relationship with Reuters given its role in “justifying and enabling the systematic assassination of 245 journalists in Gaza.”

“I owe my colleagues in Palestine at least this much, and so much more,” the journalist wrote.

The resignation comes days after the death of Anas Al-Sharif, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for Reuters, who was killed alongside the entire Al-Jazeera crew in Gaza City on August 10. Following the strike, Reuters published Israel’s claim that Al-Sharif was a Hamas operative — a claim the stringer called “entirely baseless” and part of a broader pattern of uncritical repetition of Israeli government statements.

The journalist also highlighted the killing of Reuters cameraman Hossam Al-Masri and four other journalists in a “double tap” airstrike on Nasser Hospital, in which Israel allegedly bombed a civilian site, waited for medics and reporters to arrive, and then struck again.

Western media outlets, the statement argued, bear responsibility for enabling such attacks. Quoting journalist Jeremy Scahill, the stringer accused organizations including The New York Times, The Washington Post, AP, and Reuters of acting as “a conveyor belt for Israeli propaganda, sanitizing war crimes and dehumanizing victims.”

The journalist noted that more reporters have been killed in Gaza in the past two years than in all major wars of the 20th and 21st centuries combined, including both World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, and Ukraine.

Al-Sharif, whose reporting on famine in Gaza placed him on an Israeli “hit list,” had previously appealed to international media for protection. Despite his Pulitzer-winning contributions to Reuters, the stringer said the agency failed to defend him and later misrepresented the circumstances of his death.

“I can’t conceive of wearing this press pass with anything but deep shame and grief,” the journalist said. “I don’t know what it means to begin to honour the courage and sacrifice of journalists in Gaza – the bravest and best to ever live – but going forward I will direct whatever contributions I have to offer with that front of mind.”