German authorities said Thursday they had banned an Islamic centre in Brandenburg, the state that surrounds Berlin, over its alleged links to the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

Searches were carried out at the Islamic Centre Fuerstenwalde al-Salam (IZF) and at homes in Brandenburg and Berlin on Thursday morning, the state interior ministry said.

“The Islamic Centre Fuerstenwalde is associated with the Islamist terrorist group Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood,” state interior minister Michael Stuebgen said in a statement.

“The organisation acts against the free democratic order, spreads anti-Semitic narratives and denies Israel’s right to exist. We cannot accept that.”

Germany considers Hamas a terrorist organisation, and the state ministry said it also considered the Egyptian-born Muslim Brotherhood to be a “relevant Islamist group”.

The move came less than two weeks ahead of Brandenburg parliamentary elections in which the far-right and anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party is expected to make strong gains.

The IZF was founded in 2018 and offered a range of activities for Muslims in the Fuerstenwalde area as well as running the local al-Salam mosque, according to the ministry.

Brandenburg intelligence chief Joerg Mueller said there was a danger that Muslims could be “directly exposed to extremist attitudes and Islamist ideology through the work of the association”.

Germany has vowed to crack down on Islamist extremism after seeing a reported rise in Islamist plots since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 that sparked the war in Gaza.

In July, authorities shut down the Hamburg Islamic Centre after concluding it was an “Islamist extremist organisation” with links to Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah group.

The former head of the centre, Mohammad Hadi Mofatteh, left Germany this week after being served with a deportation order.

The debate around Islamist extremism was further inflamed after a deadly knife attack in the western city of Solingen in late August.

Three people were killed and eight wounded in the rampage, allegedly carried out by a Syrian asylum seeker and claimed by the Islamic State group.