A free Palestine would be a “Taliban-like state,” Salman Rushdie has said.

Speaking during a literary festival in Berlin, Rushdie said: “I have been in favour of a separate Palestinian state most of my life, since the 1980s.

“But if there were a Palestinian state now, it would be run by Hamas and we would have a Taliban-like state – a satellite state of Iran” he told local broadcaster RBB on Thursday.

“Is this what the progressive movements of the Western Left want to create?”

Rushdie, who met German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Sunday, said he understood concerns over the suffering in Gaza.

But he added: “I would like some protesters to mention the role of Hamas, and that’s a terrorist organisation. It’s quite strange that political progressives support a fascist terrorist group.”

Turning to the pro-Palestinian protests that have swept university campuses around the world, he said “it is also necessary to ensure that other students do not feel unsafe as a result, or that the protests slide into anti-Semitic discourse, which has happened in many cases”.

Rushdie, who won the Booker prize for his novel Midnight’s Children in 1981, had a fatwa calling for his death put on him for blasphemy by Ayatollah Khomenei due to his fourth book The Satanic Verses, which portrayed the Prophet Mohammed as being swindled.

The publication caused huge controversy and sparked violent demonstrations in Mumbai and Islamabad, where at least 18 people were killed. Its Japanese translator was murdered.

In 2022, Rushdie was attacked by a 24-year-old Islamic extremist at a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in New York, who stabbed him 15 times in 27 seconds, putting him in critical condition and causing the writer to lose his right eye.

The Taliban praised the attack on Rushdie, with a spokesman saying on Twitter: “In whichever corner of the world the blasphemer of the Prophet may be, his fate will be a dreadful death.”

The Indian-born British writer recently told 60 Minutes that he had a “premonition” of being attacked just days before the stabbing.

Rushdie was in Berlin presenting his newest book Knife, a literary interpretation of the stabbing to the International Literature Festival.