Israel Says It Killed the Hamas Man Who Murdered Noa Marciano

The Israel Defense Forces and the Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, said they had attacked and killed Muhammad Essam Hassan Habil, described as the leader of a Hamas cell, on Wednesday. The strike came, the IDF said, in response to a violation of the Gaza ceasefire agreement the previous night.

According to the military, Shin Bet investigations had established that Habil brutally murdered Corporal Noa Marciano, a military lookout, while she was held captive in Gaza. Marciano was abducted from the IDF's Nahal Oz camp during the 7 October massacre. The IDF said the strike was made possible in part by intelligence gathered by its Gaza Division, the formation in which Marciano had served.

Who Noa Marciano was

The original announcement gave only her rank and role. Marciano was 19, an observation soldier in the 414th unit of the Border Defense Corps, stationed at the Nahal Oz base beside the Gaza fence, according to a Times of Israel profile published in November 2023. She was taken hostage on 7 October 2023 and killed in captivity the following month; the army declared her dead on 14 November 2023, recovered her body two days later and she was buried in Modi'in.

Observation soldiers (the tatzpitaniyot) watched the Gaza perimeter on screens from bases along the fence, and the units at Nahal Oz were among the worst hit on 7 October. The Gaza Division, credited in this announcement with the intelligence behind the strike, is the regional command that Marciano's base belonged to.

Strikes inside a ceasefire

The killing took place during a truce rather than an offensive, which is why the announcement was framed as a response to a violation. Under the agreement reached in October 2025, Israeli forces pulled back to a demarcation known as the Yellow Line, a marked boundary running through the Strip; Al Jazeera's mapping of the deal on 9 October 2025 estimated that even after that withdrawal roughly 58 per cent of Gaza would remain under Israeli control, with further pullbacks tied to later phases of the plan.

Incidents along that line have been frequent. Reviewing the IDF's own tallies, FDD's Long War Journal reported on 20 February 2026 that the military had counted 113 ceasefire violations since the truce began in October 2025, and had responded repeatedly with air strikes and with fire on armed men who crossed the Yellow Line. The pattern of announcement in each case is similar: a violation overnight, a named target struck the following day.

Why the identification came from the Shin Bet

The claim that Habil personally killed Marciano rests on interrogations rather than on battlefield evidence. The Shin Bet is Israel's domestic security and counter-terrorism agency, and the questioning of detainees taken from Gaza has been the main route by which Israel has attributed individual acts during the captivity of hostages. The Times of Israel reported on 5 February 2026 that the Shin Bet said the identification emerged from interrogations of captured suspects, and that Marciano's mother said a promise that everyone involved in her daughter's murder would be killed had been kept, while adding that there was no real comfort in it.

What is still unclear

The announcement did not say where in Gaza the strike took place, what weapons were used, or whether anyone else was killed alongside Habil. It did not describe the ceasefire violation it was answering beyond calling it one. Nor did it set out the evidence behind the Shin Bet's conclusion about Marciano's murder, or say when in the investigation that conclusion was reached.