As he talked, Mohammed Hasan’s eyes kept being drawn back to the television set in the corner of the living room. On the screen, President Obama was ordering all American flags to fly at half mast because of Mohammed’s cousin, Nidal, the army psychiatrist who gunned down 13 soldiers at a base in Texas.

Round the corner lives Nidal Hasan’s brother, a lawyer who moved to this West Bank town after he married a Palestinian woman. He was refusing to talk to anyone yesterday.

Mohammed said that he had heard from relatives in America that Nidal had been deeply unhappy about deploying to Iraq and had engaged a lawyer to try to leave the army.

“For six months he’d been trying to get out of the army,” said Mohammed, who has not seen his cousin since he visited his Palestinian family here in 1997. “I think because he’s a Muslim he didn’t want to go to Afghanistan or Iraq, and he didn’t want to expose himself to violence and death,” he told The Times.

Mohammed recalled a pleasant young man, curious about his homeland, who stayed here for several weeks 12 years ago. He was happy to have graduated and to be joining the US Army, in which his uncle and cousins had also served.

“We never noticed any strange behaviour or abnormality,” Mohammed recalled. “We never discussed politics, he was just very happy to be here.” But he added that he had heard from his American relatives that Nidal had been badly treated recently by his comrades in the Army.

“He was being treated like a Muslim, like an Arab, rather than an American — he was being discriminated against,” Mohammed said, before adding: “But this was not enough to do what he did.”

Mohammed was told about the shooting and immediately turned on the television. “When I heard what had happened I was very sad, I thought he was dead. But when I saw the number of the casualties, I starting thinking about them, about the killed and the injured.”

He fears the shooting will provoke anti-Palestinian feelings among the US public, but he urged people to be patient and find out what really lay behind the shooting spree. “The most important thing is his motivation. Nidal’s character does not fit with this, he’s a very calm, quiet person. We are bewildered.”

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