Bombings Kill 6 Israelis, Hurt 47 : Mideast: Suicide attackers set off two explosions near isolated Gaza Strip settlements. Rabin says peace talks will continue, but demands Arafat disarm violent militias.

Two Islamic suicide bombers on missions of revenge killed at least six Israelis and wounded 47, most of them soldiers, in separate attacks outside Jewish settlements here Sunday.

Israel responded to the bombings by vowing to continue peace negotiations with the Palestinians but warning that it will not withdraw from the occupied West Bank before Yasser Arafat demonstrates that he can control the security situation in the Gaza Strip.

“With suicide attacks, it is much harder to see how we can move ahead,” Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said as he visited the site of the first attack, outside this isolated settlement 10 miles south of Gaza City. “We won’t interrupt the negotiations,” he said, but “we’ll demand that they prove here in Gaza that they are capable” of preventing attacks.

Nearby, the charred remains of the blue van that had blown up next to an Israeli bus could be seen. Shortly after noon, the No. 36 bus from Ashkelon was approaching Kfar Darom, carrying settlers and young soldiers returning to their bases after weekend leave, when the van suddenly pulled alongside it, witnesses said.

A man later identified by Islamic Jihad, a militant Islamic group, as 24-year-old Khaled Mohammed Khatib from Gaza’s Nusseirat refugee camp was driving the van. Lt. Gen. Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, the Israeli army chief of staff, said that Khatib had detonated dozens of pounds of explosives hidden under bags of grass in the van.

The explosion killed Khatib and ripped out one side of the bus, hurling passengers into the air. Five soldiers, all of them 19- and 20-year-olds, were killed. Dozens of people were injured, several of them seriously.

Settlers living in the stucco houses of Kfar Darom rushed to give first aid to the wounded. Army helicopters evacuated the most seriously injured to hospitals in the Israeli towns of Beersheba and Ashkelon as soldiers sealed off the area and began searching for other explosives. Palestinian police, who jointly patrol the road with Israelis, and reporters were kept from the site.

Two hours after the first bombing, a second suicide bomber drove his car into a convoy of Israeli army jeeps escorting settler cars near Netzarim, another isolated settlement just north of Kfar Darom that has been the target of many attacks since Israel handed over most of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians in May.

One Israeli was killed and several were injured, including a pregnant woman and her daughters, ages 2 and 4. White House officials said that three Americans were injured in Sunday’s violence.

Hamas--as the Islamic Resistance Movement, the largest and most powerful Islamic organization in Gaza, is known--claimed responsibility for the Netzarim attack. Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad said that they carried out Sunday’s bombings in revenge for last week’s death of a key Hamas guerrilla, Kamal Kheil. A man who contacted an international news agency and claimed he was speaking for Hamas said that the attacks were not coordinated.

Kheil and five other Palestinians were killed when the Gaza City apartment building where they were staying was ripped by a powerful explosion. The Palestinian police and Israel said that Kheil, head of Hamas’ Iziddin al-Qassam military wing, was operating a bomb factory out of the apartment building and was the victim of an accidental explosion. But Hamas blamed Israel and the Palestinian self-governing authority for the explosion and vowed to seek revenge.

Tension has been building between the Islamic organizations and the Palestinian Authority for weeks since Arafat, the Palestine Liberation Organization chairman, stepped up verbal attacks on the groups and began allowing his security forces to arrest more of their activists.

Israeli officials recently noted that Arafat’s attitude toward the Islamic organizations seemed to be changing after months of what they regarded as his futile effort to bring the groups into the political process by trying to accommodate them.

Arafat was quick to condemn Sunday’s attacks, both publicly and in a phone call to Rabin offering his condolences to the families of the dead and wounded. Israel Television reported that Rabin demanded once again that Arafat confront Hamas and Islamic Jihad and disarm their militias.

“We are committed to confronting terrorism. These people are the enemies of peace,” Arafat said in a statement released by his office. “We call this peace the peace of the courageous, and we need courage to confront these people.”

Israel’s Parliament, which is in recess for the upcoming Passover holiday, will meet in a special session Wednesday to discuss Sunday’s attacks and Environment Minister Yossi Sarid’s call to abandon the Netzarim settlement.

On Friday, Sarid urged that Netzarim be evacuated, arguing that it and other isolated settlements in Gaza are too difficult for the Israeli army to defend. Sarid’s comments met with calls from rightist legislators for his dismissal from the government. But he was unrepentant Sunday after the attacks.

“Instead of blaming the terrorists, the right always blames terrorism on Israelis; this time it’s my turn,” Sarid said. “What created the dangers was the impossible reality the right created in the territories and not our talk about this reality.”

There are about 4,000 Jewish settlers in Gaza. Most are concentrated in two blocs--one in the north and one in the south. When Israel withdrew most of its forces from Gaza in May, it maintained control of roads leading to the settlements and jointly patrols some access roads with the Palestinians.

Talks between Israel and the Palestinians on the final status of settlements in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are due to start in 1996, but the Palestinians have called repeatedly on the Israelis to dismantle the Gaza settlements now.

The settlements “are creating a security imbalance,” Brig. Gen. Abdel Razek Najaida, commander of the Palestinian security forces in Gaza, said at an impromptu news conference at Kfar Darom after the attacks. Roads leading to the settlements “are dangerous--not only for the settlers, but for the soldiers,” he said.

“Our forces are everywhere in the Gaza Strip,” Najaida said. “But this suicide bomber, only God knows about him. This guy wants to die, and we can do nothing to stop him from killing himself.”