Druze IDF colonel Ehsan Daqsa, slain in Gaza, remembered as a ‘natural leader’
‘What else do you want from us, dear country?’ Druze religious leader asks, bemoaning ongoing discrimination against community, despite price its soldiers are paying in blood
Sue Surkes is The Times of Israel's environment reporter
Thousands of people attended the funeral on Monday of Col. Ehsan Daqsa, 41, the commander of the Israel Defense Force’s 401st Armored Brigade, bringing his hometown of Daliyat al-Karmel in northern Israel to a standstill.
Rivers of people, among them Druze religious dignitaries and soldiers in uniform of various ranks, thronged the town’s community center, where men and women collected separately in line with Druze tradition.
Daqsa was killed on Sunday in the ongoing offensive against Hamas in the northern Gaza Strip.
An IDF probe into his death found that he was outside his tank with other officers in Jabaliya when an explosive device hit them.
He and two other officers had walked several meters to an observation point that had been booby-trapped with explosives. Daqsa was killed on the spot, and the other two officers were injured.
Daqsa, who only became commander of the 401st Brigade four months ago, was one of the most senior officers to have been killed in the fighting in Gaza and the 13th member of the Druze community to fall during the war.
He was survived by his wife, Huda, and three children — Omri, aged 14; 9-year-old Rif; and Yasmin, 4.
After prayers, one speaker after the next eulogized Daqsa as a born leader who combined quiet self-confidence, resolve, and toughness with concern for his soldiers, sensitivity, humility, and a strong moral code.
Deputy Chief of Staff Amir Baram said he was the “most Israeli commander I met who knew how to explain why he was fighting.”
Daqsa, who had once tried to leave the IDF but was persuaded to stay and advance, knew how to listen to others while standing up for his views and demonstrating originality of thought and action, Baram went on.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant described Daqsa as one of the “most prominent and excellent” of the army’s field commanders, who had stood out in earlier stages of his career.
He described the citation the head of the Northern Command gave Daqsa for taking his lone tank to rescue wounded paratroopers while under fire during the Battle of Ayta ash-Shab in 2006 during the Second Lebanon War. He also noted how Daqsa, then off duty, had headed to southern Israel and gathered troops on October 7 last year to help fight some of the thousands of Hamas gunmen who had invaded the country to murder, rape and kidnap civilians.
Gallant said he last met Daqsa, a “natural leader,” during a field visit to review the dismantling of Hamas’s Rafah battalion in southern Gaza. Impressed by the commander, Gallant said he returned to the Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv, where he met the chief of staff and other senior army personnel and discovered how highly they regarded Daqsa as well.
Over 880 members of the Israeli security services have died in action since October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists breached the border and went on a murderous spree, killing some 1,200, mainly civilians, and kidnapping 251 to the Gaza Strip.
Speakers at the funeral included IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Maj.-Gen. Amir Baram; Chief Armored Officer Brig.-Gen. Ohad Maor; Sheikh Muafak Tarif, the leader of the Israeli Druze community; and Daliat el Karmel Mayor Rafik Halabi; along with members of Daqsa’s family.
Tarif and Halabi referred to what they said was the ongoing failure of successive Israeli governments to recognize the Druze as equal to Jewish citizens despite the terrible price in the blood that the community was willing to pay to defend the country.
Despite the warm embrace of large swaths of the Israeli public, the community has suffered a series of blows from the political establishment, particularly under right-wing governments of recent years.
In 2017, the Knesset passed an amendment to the planning law (known as the Kamenitz law after a Justice Ministry official) to fast-track action against illegal building without going through the courts. The amendment is widely understood to target the Arab population, where building permits are almost impossible to secure, and Arab citizens, therefore, build illegally.
The 2018 Nation-State Law, which declares the country to be the nation-state of the Jewish people, is seen by the country’s minority communities and many Jewish Israelis as insultingly exclusionary.
“What else do you want from us, dear country?” asked Sheikh Tarif rhetorically.
One of many family members who maintained contact with Daqsa via a family Whatsapp group said he had joked that the current olive harvest was worse than being in Gaza’s Jabaliya. He went on, “He [Daqsa] replied that it was better to harvest olives because war was terrible.”
Addressing the fallen commander, one of Daqsa’s brothers said his widow, Huda, “felt something heavy when you died. When you didn’t reply to the phone, as you always did, she knew the worst had happened.”
Daqsa was buried in the Druze military cemetery in Isfiya, next to Daliat el-Karmel.
