Brigadier-General Sagiv Dahan assumed his role as the Commanding Officer of the IDF's 162nd "Steel Formation" Division at a changeover ceremony on Sunday, the IDF announced Monday.
Dahan replaces Brigadier-General Itzik Cohen, who will become Head of the IDF's Operations Directorate (J3) and be promoted to Major-General.
162nd Division is subordinate to the IDF's Southern Command. CO Southern Command, Maj.-Gen. Yaniv Asor led the ceremony.
During the ceremony, the three commanders discussed the 162nd Division's achievements since October 7 and their hopes for the division's future.
Yaniv Asor, who took over from the previous CO Southern Command, Yaron Finkleman, in March, was serving as the Head of the IDF's Personnel Directorate (J1) on October 7.
IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir was pressured to replace senior IDF officers, including Finkleman, for their failures during the October 7 Massacre.
During his speech, Asor referred to soldiers of the 162nd Division as operating in "silence that betrays confidence, loving your subordinates, biting your tongue, and feeling pain as your friends fell, staying determined, and striving forward."
"We will not stop until our kidnapped brothers are returned home and Hamas is defeated," Asor added.
Outgoing CO 162nd Division Itzik Cohen stated that they "failed" on October 7, but that "when our country was on fire and the entire nation looked towards us, we went out to fight, we didn't wait, we came from all over the country to save lives."
"We haven't stopped for a moment," Cohen added.
Probes into the IDF's failure
Most recently, the findings of an IDF probe into the failure to protect Kibbutz Nirim on October 7 were released on Friday.
Around 150 Hamas terrorists in three separate waves invaded Nirim and the surrounding areas, murdering five civilians and taking five now-deceased residents hostage. Further, in the battles in and around the kibbutz, Hamas’s invaders killed 10 soldiers and took another eight hostage.
Israel Police and the IDF both completely ignored all security dangers regarding the Nova music festival leading into and during Hamas’s October 7 invasion of southern Israel, it appears based on the IDF's October 7 probe issued on April 3.
Despite multiple failures on the IDF’s part, unlike Hamas’s attacks on some other IDF positions on October 7, the destruction of the Erez crossing did not remove any strategic assets, the army said in its probe published on March 30.
Rather, it mainly harmed the Gazan population itself by ending a relatively lucrative employment situation for 18,000 Gazans to work daily in Israel.
Yonah Jeremy Bob contributed to this report