Spotlight: Aaron Bours

Aaron Bours (@freshprinceoftelaviv), 35, is a lone soldier of the Givati Brigade from Great Neck, New York, and was critically injured in Gaza on November 14th, 2023 during Operation Iron Swords. While abroad at a conference in Las Vegas on October 7th, Aaron, who proudly volunteers in the Israeli Defense Force Reserves, rushed back to Israel and his unit as they prepared to enter Gaza. During combat, Aaron was wounded while attempting to save his officer, Omri David Z”L, during a firefight out of an UNRWA school in the north of the Gaza Strip. Outside of the Israeli Defense Forces, Aaron is a founding team member and Chief Marketing Officer at Hyro, a conversational and generative AI startup in digital health, and is a mentor for entrepreneurs at Techstars. Aaron has accumulated 10 years of experience in the tech sector at companies like Check Point and Google, after completing his BA in Marketing at Reichman University in 2015.

Currently, Aaron is after 5 months of hospitalization and 4 surgeries at Sheba Medical Center, but has taken time from rehabilitation to focus of Israeli advocacy — touring college campuses across the US as well as the UK and South Korea in the hopes of bringing facts from the battlefield to the fight against antisemitism, and has been featured in the NY Post, Reuter’s and The Jerusalem Post as well as on air via ABC News, News Nation and The Daily Wire with Ben Shapiro. Aaron has also helped to raise $2 million for injured soldiers through organizations such as Beit Halochem and RESTART.