A Swedish Left Party member of parliament has praised a local leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades and sent a letter of support to the imprisoned terrorist, prompting an admission of error from both the politician and her party.
Ilona Szatmári Waldau, a Riksdag member for the Left Party (Vänsterpartiet) since 2018, wrote an open letter in December 2025 to Ahmad al-Moghrabi, who is serving 18 life sentences in Israel.
Al-Moghrabi was arrested in 2002, when he was a local commander of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the armed wing of Fatah and a group listed as a terrorist organisation by the EU and the US. He was convicted of organising suicide bombings during the Second Intifada.
They included an attack on March 2, 2002 on families gathered after a bar mitzvah celebration in the Beit Yisrael district of Jerusalem, which killed 11 people, among them two infants.
Another attack involved a 17-year-old Palestinian girl who had been sent with a bomb to blow herself up among the customers in a supermarket in Jerusalem on March 29, 2002. The day before the attack, al-Moghrabi recorded a farewell and confession video with the girl and is said to have personally handed over the bomb at her school.
In her letter, Szatmári Waldau wrote that his “courage and perseverance in the fight for freedom and dignity” inspired people far beyond Palestine, and declared: “Your fight is also our fight.”
The letter formed part of a wider campaign in which several Left Party MPs and MEPs sent messages of solidarity to Palestinian prisoners, coordinated with information from the Palestinian Association in Sweden.
After the matter was revealed by newspaper Expressen on August 3, 2026, Szatmári Waldau said the fact-checking had gone wrong.
She stated on Facebook that none of the prisoners selected for the campaign were supposed to have been involved in violence against civilians, removed the post, and insisted that she does not support terrorism or violence against civilians.
The party leadership described the mistake as unacceptable and said all related posts had been deleted. The Left Party has since ended its cooperation with the association that supplied the information and said it was reviewing its procedures for similar campaigns.
The episode has drawn sharp criticism from government ministers, who argued that it forms part of a recurring pattern of Left Party figures expressing solidarity with individuals convicted of terrorism.
Foreign minister Maria Malmer Stenergard said she was deeply provoked by the party’s explanations, telling Expressen that tributes to terrorism and anti-Semitism kept recurring within it.
Party leader Nooshi Dadgostar described the reports as very serious and said the party had not known the prisoner’s background when the letter was sent.
She also expressed her support for Szatmári Waldau, telling Aftonbladet that her colleague had meant to argue for a fair trial under the Geneva Conventions, and adding: “I feel very comfortable with her values.”
