The Israeli occupation forces claimed it has completed the withdrawal of thousands of its soldiers from the Gaza Strip, as part of a major withdrawal of Israeli forces from the northern Gaza Strip, ordered at the political levels as part of an emergency, Israeli media reported on Tuesday.

The Palestinian resistance in Gaza is engaged in fierce clashes with the invading occupation forces on multiple fronts in the Strip. As a result, the death toll of soldiers who died during the ground invasion has risen to 180 since the beginning of the incursion.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that "Israeli forces are fighting an invisible enemy on the northern front."

The newspaper quoted Alon Britan, a platoon commander, as saying: "There is a feeling that we are sitting ducks because the average soldier does not understand big-picture tactics." 

"The results will be dire if the authorities do not find solutions for the reserve soldiers and there will be less willingness to report for reserve service," a reserve soldier was quoted as saying.

Fear creeping in from the north

A report published in The Washington Post addressed the crisis faced by Israeli settlers amid the military escalation on the northern front with Hezbollah in Lebanon for about three months, which has led thousands of them to evacuate their settlements, fearing Resistance operations.

"This is not an official war zone. Yet explosions from Israeli artillery and Hezbollah missiles echo across the rock-strewn mountains nearly every day," the report read.

David Shtift, an Israeli settler in Kibbutz "Eilon", was quoted as saying, "What happened in the south [i.e in Gaza] was exactly what we were saying could happen here [in northern Palestine], and still could."

The report claimed that at least 70,000 Israeli settlers had evacuated settlements in the north in the wake of the operations of the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon, turning the area into a closed military zone. It noted that several Israeli battalions comprising thousands of soldiers have been deployed there instead.

According to the Post, the Israeli assassination of the Deputy Head of the Political Bureau of Hamas, Saleh al-Arouri, in Beirut "heightened fears in the region that the skirmishes along this volatile borderland could explode into all-out war."

The report noted that "Israel" regards Hezbollah "as a proper army with sophisticated training and an arsenal of some 150,000 missiles," adding that many Israeli settlers fear that the Israeli government is, once again, underestimating a deadly threat.