Foreign Minister and Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Liberman vowed Tuesday morning that the first bill to be considered in the next Knesset will be one to debate whether or not to impose a death sentence on terrorists.

Liberman contended “we’re inviting more and more terrorism,” in an address at the INSS Conference in Tel Aviv.

“The fight against terrorism is the biggest challenge the world faces in the 21st century,” he said. “This is also Israel’s biggest challenge. But there’s a wide gap between that which Israel speaks to, and that which is actually carried out here,” Liberman continued.

“Releasing terrorists – including those who have committed the most horrendous of attacks, such as the lynching in Ramallah – is the worst possible message to send in the war against terror,” Liberman contended. “We have to show terrorists we are switching gears, that there are no more deals,” he said.

“What’s important is to already starting thinking about how to prevent the fifth round of fighting [in Gaza],” Liberman went on.

“Every military operation must end with a decisive victory, otherwise we’re eroding our capabilities and our deterrence,” he pointed out.

“Because we find ourselves in a military conflict against Hamas every two years Israel is unable to make long-term plans like a normal country – not on policy, and not on economic issues.” This is an untenable situation, Liberman asserted.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has declared a seven-day period of national mourning in response to the latest barbarity by Daesh, or ISIS – the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria terrorist organization.  Egypt’s leader also convened the National Defense Council.

A spokesperson for Egypt’s Coptic Church also has confirmed the murders of the young men, all of whom  were beheaded by the terror group.

According to Egypt’s official state news agency, Daesh released a video on Sunday showing the execution of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians who were kidnapped months ago in Libya.

All were men dressed in the now-traditional orange prisoner jumpsuit, marched out to the shoreline and then lined up on their knees on the sand. They were executed at a beach that the video named as, “Wilayat Tarabulus by the Mediterranean Sea.”

Behind each captive was a black-masked executioner with a knife. After a brief statement by the Daesh leader, all were beheaded simultaneously.

The video, slickly produced, was entitled “A Message Signed With Blood to the nation of the cross.” It was released by Al Hayat Media Center, the media outlet for Daesh, and appeared on the Twitter feed on a pro-Daesh website.

El-Sisi called on Egyptian Copts to “come home,” saying their return to Egypt is the only way to ensure their protection from radical Islamist terrorism.

A separate video posted by the group earlier purported to show 17 captive Kurdish fighters in cages paraded through the streets of Iraq, most likely as a prelude to a flaming execution similar to that of Jordanian fighter pilot Muath al-Kasaesbeh.

Daesh has also reportedly publicly executed two alleged “spies” and a third man was crucified to a post with a sign hanging around his neck in the Syrian city of Al-Bab. Photos of the executions emerged Sunday on the Internet and were posted in a report by the British Daily Mail newspaper.

The IDF has released a video that gives a rare look into training of elite soldiers in the Counter Terrorism Unit who have to deal terrorists who take hostages.

One of the most important and difficult tasks is to approach the terrorists in absolute quiet.

This is the Tale of Two Cities: Old Rafah, and New Rafah – that is, the Egyptian half of the Gaza city that currently straddles the border with Egypt, and the one soon to be on the drawing boards of /Egyptian engineers.

North Sinai District Governor Abd al-Fattah Harour told journalists at a news briefing Wednesday that Egypt has decided to raze Rafah to the ground – at least, the part that exists on Egypt’s side of the border.

“A new Rafah city is being established with residential zones appropriate to the nature and traditions of the residents of Rafah,” Harour said, according to the Ma’an news agency.

He confirmed that engineering units have already been authorized to begin work on the project.

Egypt is currently evacuating some 2,044 families from 1,220 homes located on a stretch of land along the border with Gaza. The families are to be compensated for the loss of their homes and also will receive additional funds with which to rent new accommodations until they can find new places to live.

The evacuation is being carried out in preparation for creation of a wider buffer zone between Egypt and Gaza. Original plans a year ago called for a buffer of 500 meters; the current buffer zone is to measure at least a kilometer wide.

However, this latest development has come about because the existence of the city of Rafah still constitutes a military weak point for Egypt vis a vis Gaza and Hamas, as it does for Israel.

Rafah is also the sole international crossing which is not under Israel’s control and which remains vulnerable to seizure by international terrorists. (In Jordan, the sole crossing with Iraq was shut down last year after the Iraq side was seized by terrorists from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). European monitors in Rafah who were supposed to remain at the site to “keep the peace” and maintain its neutrality abandoned their posts at the first sign of danger years ago.

On January 23, 2008 Hamas blew a hole in the security barrier built in 2003 near the Rafah crossing, destroying a significant part of the wall. The United Nations estimated that as many as 750,000 Gazans flooded through that hole into Egypt from that day forward until the breach was repaired, 11 days later. Many came to shop for food and supplies, but several thousand were also wanted terrorists; Israel Police raised the alert in the Jewish State knowing it was likely these “shoppers” were also purchasing “supplies.”

Gaza’s ruling Hamas terrorist organization was spawned by Egypt’s outlawed Muslim Brotherhood organization. The group has sparked endless anti-government attacks in Egypt, and developed alliances with other groups, leading to further problems.

During the recent brief reign of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s predecessor, Muslim Brotherhood-backed President Mohammed Morsi and his Islamist-majority parliament, Sinai became saturated with radical Islamist terrorists.

Terror groups such as the Al Qaeda-linked Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, which recently swore allegiance to ISIS, grew there exponentially. Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda-linked Army of Islam Salafis also planted bases in Sinai as well.

In particular, Hamas honeycombed the area under the border in Rafah with tunnels which they used for smuggling military supplies and luxury items into Gaza – and terrorists out, in to Sinai and elsewhere.

It is this activity the Cairo government is determined to end. Egypt’s security personnel have destroyed hundreds of terrorist tunnels over the past 18 months, but they are often rebuilt when Hamas obtains new supplies.

As international aid organizations bring concrete and other building materials into the enclave to “help” the poverty stricken Palestinian Authority residents rebuild their homes, Hamas confiscates the items to reconstruct their terror tunnel network. It’s an expensive project: each tunnel costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to build.

An elderly French Jew born in Tunisia was among those slaughtered Wednesday in a terror attack in Paris.

Jewish caricature artist Georges Wolinski, 81, was one of 12 people shot and killed in the attack at the ‘Charlie Hebdo’ satiric magazine offices.

Wolinsky was the son of Siegried Wolinski, a Polish Jew, and Lola Bembaron, a Tunisian Jewish woman. He moved with his parents to France at the age of 13.

Although he began his college life as a student of architecture, he eventually switched to cartooning and by 1960 had co-founded a satirical magazine with a friend. The well-known cartoonist went on to work with leading French publications such as Paris Match, Le Nouvel Observateur, and L’Humanite, as well as Charlie Hebdo.

Jewish leaders in Europe were among the first to condemn the attack. They pointed out the event was a sign of what may soon become a potential tsunami of terror on the continent.

European Jewish Congress President Moshe Kantor said in a statement that the slaughter was “the beginning of a wave of terror” in Europe. He called the attack part of a “war against freedom of speech and the European way of life, which has already seen Jewish children gunned down at school and people murdered in cold blood while visiting a museum in Brussels.”

The president of the National Bureau of Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism, Sammy Ghozlan, warned the attack constituted a “wake up” call.

“France must wake up to the danger of Islamism and the terror it brings all over the world: In Paris, Toulouse, Sarcelles, Brussels, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, jihadists are acting on the same radical Islamist ideology that is used to manipulate them,” he said.

French police are on a nationwide manhunt for two of the three terrorists who attacked journalists in the Paris office of the French satiric ‘Charlie Hebdo‘ weekly magazine on Wednesday. A third has surrendered.

An earlier unconfirmed report had stated that one of the terrorists had been killed and that two had been captured.

Police tracked the terrorists to a location in northeastern France, about 90 miles from Paris. Two of the killers, Said and Cherif Kouachi, are 34 and 32-year-old brothers of Algerian descent who live in Paris. An unrelated third terrorist, 18-year-old Hamid Mourad, surrendered.

All three are French nationals and speak fluent, colloquial French. They were reportedly trained in Syria at a radical Islamist terror base and possibly in Iraq as well.

One of the three told a female employee they were linked to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) as they entered the building to begin their targeted assassinations aimed at killing those who had published cartoons of the founder of Islam, the prophet Muhammed.

When it was over, 11 people were wounded and 12 were dead, including the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Stephan Chardonnier, 81-year-old Jewish caricature artist Georges Wolinsky and two police officers who responded to the attack.

Chardonnier, who was listed on Al Qaeda’s “Most Wanted” list, told friends he would “rather die standing than be slaughtered on my knees.”

The official WAFA Palestinian Authority news agency has honored the murderers with the supreme Islamic status of “Shahids” who were “escorted… to the place of their final rest.”

Palestinian Media Watch translated and published on Tuesday the WAFA report from last Friday  in which it stated in the Arabic language newspaper  Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, “Yesterday [Dec. 25, 2014], the citizens of Jerusalem escorted the bodies of Martyrs (Shahids) Ghassan and Uday Abu Jamal, from the Jabel Mukaber neighborhood of south-east Jerusalem, to the place of their final rest in the Al-Sawahreh Al-Sharqiyeh cemetery, after they were held by the occupation for 37 days, and transferred to their relatives after midnight.”

The Facebook page of the Fatah movement, headed by Mahmoud Abbas, posted a picture last Thursday of the graves of the two terrorists and praised them:

    This is the place of eternal rest of Martyrs (Shahids) Ghassan and Uday Abu Jamal of Jabel Mukaber [neighborhood] in occupied Jerusalem, who ascended [to heaven] a month and a half ago during an operation (i.e., terror attack) at an occupation synagogue in occupied Jerusalem. Early morning today, they were escorted to their graves at Al-Sawahreh Al- Sharqiyeh.”

Fatah called the terror attack “an operation at an occupation synagogue in occupied Jerusalem.”

Two Arab terrorists from eastern Jerusalem entered a synagogue in the Har Nof neighborhood of western Jerusalem on November 18 and massacred worshippers with guns, knives and axes, killing four Jews and a Druze police officer, and wounding seven other Jews who were praying.

The terrorists were killed in an exchange of fire with Israeli police that arrived on the scene.

Earlier this month, Palestinian Media Watch reported that the PA Mufti likewise called them Shahids, when he demanded that Israel return the bodies of the killers because “it is the Shahids’ right for us to pray for them, and this is a right according to Shari’ah. Their relatives, friends and loved ones also have the right to see them one last time.”

Palestinian Media Watch also showed that Abbas’ condemnation of the synagogue massacre was later explained away by Fatah officials as a condemnation for diplomatic reasons only.