After more than 70 days of fighting in Gaza, Itamar Hayun came back to Moshav Avihayil, the farming community in the Hefer Valley where he lives. As he has told it since, he stood outside the door with his rifle and his uniform still carrying the dust of the Strip, about to put the key in the lock, when a thought stopped him. He had been ready to die for his home. The apartment in front of him was rented.
That moment, which Hayun described in a July interview with Kikar FM, is the origin of two things he has built since October 7, 2023: a book, The Elite Warrior Mindset, and a movement called Homes for Warriors. This month he is taking the first to the Frankfurt Book Fair in search of international publishers and translation partners. He hopes it will open doors for the second.
Hayun grew up on the Carmel in Haifa and served in the Givati Brigade. In the summer of 2014 he had just been discharged and was traveling in South America when he learned that Hadar Goldin, a soldier from his own team, had been taken by Hamas in Gaza. He told Kikar FM the trip became a way of running. He spent the next four years in the United States, where he built a business. He came back, he has said, because he felt he did not belong there. He married, had a son, Yonatan, and divorced. He is raising the boy on his own.
On October 7 he was called up at once. He has said he was at the site of the Nova music festival in the days that followed. To cope, he wrote what he saw in a notebook. Then, by his account, he looked up, saw a group of soldiers dancing and singing, put the notebook down and joined them.
His unit, the Givati sappers, waited three weeks for the order to go into Gaza. He says he spent them studying Jewish history. When the ground operation began, his unit was among the first into Beit Hanoun, where its job was to take ground and demolish buildings with explosives. He has described a sniper's bullet passing close enough to see. He lost friends there. He has since served at least five rounds of reserve duty, in Gaza and in Judea and Samaria.
The book came out of that stretch. "I realized that much of this war was mental," he told Unpacked earlier this year. The Elite Warrior Mindset, published in Hebrew and English, is in two parts. The first sets out what he believes a fighter needs in the field: focus, discipline, teamwork, a sense of history and identity. The second carries those into civilian life and business, where Hayun has worked for years as a mentor to entrepreneurs. He says it is aimed especially at readers between 18 and 30.
The housing came next. Driving back from the funeral of a teammate's father, Hayun looked at the four men in the car with him. All were in their thirties. Some were officers, some worked in tech, all had families, and all had given hundreds of days to the reserves. None of them owned a home. "We are an army of nomads," he recalled thinking.
Hayun has put numbers on his own version of that. As a conscript he was paid 700 shekels a month. Later, earning around 10,000 a month, he still found himself juggling rent against everything else.
Homes for Warriors runs on a slogan: "Those who fight for a home, deserve a home." What it asks the state for is modest. It does not want apartments in Tel Aviv. It wants land in the Negev, the Galilee or the Gaza border region, where reservists can put up a caravan to begin with and build a community over time. Hayun's argument is that the state gets something back: trained fighters living in the places where a fast response matters most.
He has said he held nearly 300 meetings in a single year with ministers, Knesset members, council heads and planners, and took a zero-interest loan through the lending platform SparkIL to keep going. The movement's reported size has grown with each telling: more than 1,000 families a year ago, about 2,300 by February, and more than 5,000 fighters by July, who between them, Kikar FM reported, have served close to a million days of reserve duty in this war.
The state has not ignored the problem. The government has announced a program to offer 20,000 discounted homes and plots to reservists over two years. In one round of the national housing lottery, about one in five reservists who applied won the right to buy.
Hayun says his movement has now gone further than meetings. According to Homes for Warriors, families have begun relocating to communities near the Gaza border, and the group is promoting a national housing covenant that asks leaders from across the political spectrum to back easier access to land and housing for reservists and their families.
"The Warrior Mindset is not only about surviving difficult times," Hayun says. "It is about turning crisis into action and action into real-world impact."
What he wants at the end of it is smaller than any of that. "I want to plant trees and watch them grow taller than him," he wrote last year, of his son.
