Sweden’s Left Party is facing mounting criticism after several of its politicians sent personal letters of solidarity to Palestinian prisoners, including men convicted of some of Israel’s deadliest terrorist attacks.
The controversy centres on a December 2025 campaign involving 24 Left Party members of the Swedish and European parliaments.
According to the Palestinian Authority’s Commission for Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, the politicians displayed photographs of 24 prisoners at their parliamentary seats for two weeks, with each participant sending a personal letter to one of them.
The Left Party disputes that account, insisting that only “a handful” of its politicians sent letters.
The row began after Expressen revealed that Left Party MP Ilona Szatmári Waldau had written to Ahmad al-Moghrabi, who has been serving 18 life sentences since 2002 for leading the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the terrorist-designated armed wing of Fatah.
Al-Moghrabi was convicted of organising attacks during the Second Intifada, including sending a suicide bomber to a bar mitzvah celebration in Jerusalem. Eleven people were killed, including two babies. He was also implicated in an attack in which a 17-year-old Palestinian girl was sent to blow herself up at a market.
“Your courage and perseverance in the fight for freedom and dignity touch and inspire far beyond Palestine,” Szatmári Waldau wrote. “Your fight is also our fight.”
Sweden’s Minister for Civil Defence, Carl-Oskar Bohlin, condemned the campaign on X.
“The ENTIRE parliamentary group of the Left Party has thus tried to become pen pals with a bunch of convicted murderers and terrorists,” he wrote. “That surpasses my worst prejudices about this party.”
Bohlin added that the politicians had “naturally been fully aware” of what they were doing.
Another prisoner on the Palestinian Authority’s list was Hamas member Mu’ath Bilal, who is serving 26 life sentences for planning two suicide bombings in Jerusalem in 1997.
The first, at the Mahane Yehuda market, killed 16 people and injured more than 170. The second, in the Ben Yehuda shopping district, killed five and wounded more than 180.
The list also included Adam Jumaa and Mahmoud Salem Suleiman Abu Khurbaish, who were convicted of throwing a Molotov cocktail into a bus in 1988, killing a mother, her three children and a soldier.
Left Party parliamentary group leader Samuel Gonzales Westling reportedly wrote to Ibrahim Abu Mokh, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for kidnapping and murdering a 19-year-old Israeli conscript.
However, Expressen noted that not everyone named on the list had been convicted of attacks. Several were detained as minors or were still awaiting trial, while the list also included a journalist and a doctor.
Following the backlash, the Left Party admitted that the initiative had “gone wrong” and deleted its related social media posts.
The party said it had asked the Palestinian Association of Sweden to provide the names of prisoners who had not participated in attacks against civilians, but acknowledged that it had failed to check the recipients properly.
“We let others carry out the background checks, and we failed,” foreign policy spokesman Håkan Svenneling told Expressen. “We trusted others.”
