‘Good commanders take the threat seriously’: Maj. Gen. Bar Kalifa pays tribute to slain Col. Asaf Hamami

IDF Personnel Directorate chief Maj. Gen. Dado Bar Kalifa says that “good commanders take the threat seriously and work all day and all night in preparation for war,” during a memorial ceremony for Col. Asaf Hamami, who commanded the Gaza Division’s Southern Brigade during Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught and was killed while fighting alongside his soldiers.

“‘Be good, be Hamami’ was the guiding phrase of Asaf’s life – a sentence that, by my estimation, he would never have said about himself,” Bar Kalifa says. “He was humble, the most modest of men.”

“Good commanders regard every position as their last – free to speak their minds and to do wholeheartedly what they believe in,” he adds. “Every position is the role of their lives, with only the mission and their people before their eyes.”