Col. Ehsan Daxa, the commander of the 401st Brigade of the 162nd Armored Division, was killed in Jabalya in the northern Gaza Strip, the IDF announced on Sunday evening.
Daxa, 41, from Daliat al-Carmel, a Druze town near Haifa, leaves behind a wife and three children. He was killed when an explosive device detonated near his tank. Another officer was seriously wounded. This is the third week that the 162nd Division has been operating in Jabalya, following the IDF’s entry in November and December and the 98th Division’s invasion in May.
Daxa received the OC Northern Command Citation for Bravery during the Second Lebanon War (2006), following an incident in which he rescued Paratroopers who were being shelled by Hezbollah fighters in Ayta ash Shab in southern Lebanon.
Daxa went in to help them, as Hezbollah terrorists attempted to shoot at his crew. When he arrived, his tank shelled a home where the terrorists were operating, and the firing stopped. Afterwards, he established communication with the commander, who had suffered the loss of one soldier and four injuries. Daxa and one of his tank crew rescued the soldiers and brought them to the border fence.
“I do not doubt that I would do the same thing today,” Daxa had said the following year. The IDF said he received the citation for “bravery, courage, resourcefulness, and professionalism.”
IDF chief spokesman R.-Adm. Daniel Hagari said, “On October 7, he immediately hopped in and had not stopped since.” He added that Daxa commanded over Tel al-Sultan in Rafah in southern Gaza, where Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar was killed last week. Daxa’s command over the area is what “stopped Sinwar from escaping all these months,” Hagari said.
Druze hero falls
“This is a reminder of the heavy price” of war, he added.
Daliat regional council head Rafik Halabi wrote, “How the mighty have fallen. Daliat al-Carmel, the IDF, the Druze community, and the State of Israel say a painful and sorrowful goodbye today to one of its heroes. Daxa was a hero; he was brave; he was a soldier who became a legend; and he was modest. He’s been fighting since the beginning of the war.”
Druze spiritual leader Sheikh Muafak Tarif said, “The IDF today lost one of its best field commanders, who led the troops on the battlefield. This loss is painful; it is incomprehensible that this hero, who was slated for greatness, is not with us.”
The IDF announced on Sunday that two divisions operating throughout the Gaza Strip killed dozens of fighters, destroyed terrorist infrastructure, and confiscated many weapons. In southern Gaza, troops struck a terrorist cell. Gaza health officials said that an Israeli attack killed dozens in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza; Israel said it was investigating the reports and that the strike hit a Hamas target, questioning an earlier death toll of 73 released by the Hamas media office.
“Following an initial IDF examination, the numbers published by the Office of Hamas-run Government Information Office in Gaza – are exaggerated and do not align with the information held by the IDF, the precise munitions used, and the accuracy of the strike on a Hamas terror target,” the IDF stated.
The military added that it “continues to examine and calls on the media to act with caution about information released by Hamas sources, as they have been proven to be sorely unreliable in previous incidents. We emphasize that the area in question is an active war zone. The IDF is precisely operating and is doing everything possible to avoid causing harm to civilians.”
Tor Wennesland, the UN Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, condemned continued attacks on civilians after the strike. “This follows weeks of intensified operations resulting in scores of civilian fatalities and [a] near total lack of humanitarian aid reaching populations in the north,” he said.
Hamas’s massacre on October 7, 2023, was joined by Hezbollah strikes on the North one day later and by coordinated aerial attacks from the Houthis in Yemen and militias in Iraq, as well as by shooting and stabbing attacks encouraged to Palestinians in the West Bank. All are Iranian proxy groups, funded and supplied by Tehran.
Security forces arrested five suspects armed with an M16 and a magazine near Nabi Musa, close to Jericho in the West Bank. They were transferred for further investigation.
On the Egyptian border, female observer soldiers identified and reported on a drone that was trailing Israeli forces and crossing into Israeli territory. Soldiers who arrived shot down the drone and found in it eight guns and accompanying magazines.
Hagari, in an unusual statement on Sunday night, warned that Israel will carry out targeted strikes on sites belonging to Hezbollah’s financial arm in Lebanon in the coming hours and Lebanese residents have been urged to evacuate areas close to those facilities.
The IDF announced on Sunday that it hit Hezbollah HQ’s intelligence center and an underground weapons workshop in Beirut. Fighter jets killed three Hezbollah commanders.
Reuters witnesses saw smoke rising from Beirut’s southern suburbs, once a densely populated zone that also housed Hezbollah offices and underground installations. Hezbollah made no immediate comment on the strikes but said it had fired missiles at Israeli forces in Lebanon and at a base in northern Israel.
“Prior to the strike, numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians, including issuing advanced warnings to the population in the area,” it added. It said it killed Hezbollah’s Southern Front senior commander, Al-Haj Abbas Salama, who it said served in several positions in the area over the years, overseeing combat in the Bint Jbeil area.
The IDF also confirmed the deaths of Rada Abbas Awada and Ahmad Ali Hussein. “Awada was a senior Hezbollah communications expert and Hussein served as the head of a weapons manufacturing unit that was responsible for the build-up of Hezbollah’s strategic weaponry, following in-depth manufacturing training in Iran,” the military said. Lebanese security and civil defense sources reported on Sunday in southern Lebanon that an Israeli strike on a house serving as a clinic killed two aid workers, while the Lebanese military reported the deaths of three soldiers in a strike on an army vehicle.
The IDF announced that Warr.-Ofc. Yishai (Netanel) Greenbaum, who was wounded in southern Lebanon two weeks ago, succumbed to his wounds on Saturday. He was 38.
It said that throughout Saturday, 175 terrorist targets were hit in Lebanon and Gaza and that dozens of fighters were killed. In southern Lebanon, at least 65 Hezbollah terrorists were killed, and dozens of terrorist targets were hit, including cells and rocket launchers aimed at Israel and military targets, the military said.
Sirens sounded in the North around noon on Sunday from around 70 Hezbollah rockets, some landing in open areas and igniting fires. Approximately 30 rockets followed around 12:30 p.m., also igniting fires. More followed at 1 p.m., and twice more on the hour following. In the morning, the IAF shot down an aerial drone above the sea near Haifa.
Close to 4 p.m., sirens rang throughout the Galilee region, and one aerial target was intercepted. Ten more followed around 4:30 p.m.; some were shot down while others fell in open areas.
Reuters contributed to this report.