7 Israelis Killed in Suicide Bombing : Mideast: Car driven by Palestinian explodes near bus picking up students, injuring 45 others. Extremists claim responsibility for apparent reprisal for Hebron massacre.

A car packed with high explosives, nails and propane gas driven by a Palestinian suicide bomber exploded near a commuter bus Wednesday as it stopped for students in northern Israel, killing at least seven Israelis as well as the car’s driver and injuring 45 others.

The attack was apparently a reprisal for a Jewish settler’s massacre of about 30 Palestinian worshipers in Hebron on Feb. 25; it was timed to coincide with the 40th day of Islamic mourning for those killed in the Cave of the Patriarchs.

Israeli police said Hamas, a radical Palestinian fundamentalist group, claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s explosion, which sent pieces of the bus, car and their occupants flying dozens of yards in the sleepy blue-collar town of Afula.

Witnesses described a horrible scene. The blast left its young victims mangled and burned, and a square block was strewn with bodies and parts of bodies.

The brutal incident shocked Israel on the eve of its annual Holocaust commemoration.

Wednesday night at the Holocaust Museum here, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin did not comment on the attack at ceremonies marking the day Israel has set aside to recall the killing of 6 million Jews by Nazi Germany.

But President Ezer Weizman declared: “Today, on the eve of the Holocaust memorial day, we paid a heavy price for being Jews, for working to live a peaceful life in the land of Israel. The long, historic cycle of blood continues . . . and this criminal act of terror took place as the hope and expectations for peace are standing at the gate.”

Other Israelis expressed deeper anger at the bus bombing. At the blast scene in Afula, some chanted “Death to Arabs.” There were dozens of angry protest rallies across the country by opposition groups--unprecedented on a day that Israel sets aside for its Holocaust remembrance and quiet reflection.

Wednesday’s attack provoked fears of new retaliation and shook the peace process that has fueled escalating violence by extremist groups on both sides.

As right-wing Jewish settlers staged demonstrations Wednesday night to protest both the attack and the Israeli government’s decision to continue negotiating with the Palestine Liberation Organization over Palestinian autonomy in the occupied territories, Israeli army and police officials braced for more bloodletting.

All roads into Afula were closed. Israeli police and army reinforcements were rushed to nearby Arab towns. Police evacuated all Arab workers who were in Afula at the time to protect them. The army and police clamped more security measures on Israeli-occupied territories, already sealed off after the Hebron massacre as a precaution against revenge attacks.

Speaking amid the wreckage at the site of the noon bombing, Police Minister Moshe Shahal insisted that nothing could have prevented the attack.

He said the massive police reinforcements and security precautions in place for the past month have prevented “a big part of the intended (revenge) attacks.” Police and army officials have said armed Palestinian fundamentalist and extremist groups vowed to retaliate against the Israelis for the Hebron killings, which Israel’s government has blamed on a lone madman.

But Rafi Peled, Israel’s police chief, said he will take even stricter measures in the territories, including barring all cars from the area entering Israel--even with special permits--for at least a week.

Police said the car used in Wednesday’s attack--a light-blue Opel Ascona sedan with Israeli license plates that didn’t belong with it--was stolen in Tel Aviv on March 23. Investigators speculated that the vehicle was smuggled into the territories and kept there until Wednesday, when it crossed back into Israel from the northern West Bank.

The savagery of the attack in Afula--a town hit in the past by Palestinian terrorists operating across Israel’s more porous northern border with the occupied West Bank--brought calls from the Israeli opposition for suspension of negotiations with the PLO.

Formal talks between Israel and the PLO reconvened in Egypt last week for the first time since the Hebron massacre. (Those sessions were adjourned Wednesday until Sunday as Israeli delegates insisted on making a scheduled departure for Holocaust commemorations at home.)

Many Israelis were incensed that PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, in Cairo for consultations on the autonomy talks, had not condemned the assault. The United States, which decried the attack, urged him to do so.

“The government’s policy of nonstop concessions to the PLO and terrorism only brings us more and more terrorism,” declared Benjamin Netanyahu, Likud Party chairman and leader of Israel’s political right, which has opposed the Palestinian autonomy plan since its signing in Washington last September. “The government should stop the peace talks immediately.”

He and other opposition leaders directly linked Wednesday’s bombing to the return to the Gaza Strip and Jericho less than 24 hours earlier of 50 Palestinian deportees--engineers of the intifada , the Palestinian uprising, and key activists of Arafat’s Fatah wing who had been expelled years ago as suspected terrorist leaders.

Their dramatic re-entry, a key concession by the Israeli government, was among the first real signs of change in the occupied lands, and it fueled hopes among many Palestinians and Israelis of an imminent agreement on Israel’s long-delayed promise to withdraw its troops and allow Palestinian autonomy beginning in Gaza and Jericho. But Netanyahu observed, “On the day that this government brings back deported terrorists comes this despicable, murderous attack in Afula.”

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, chief architect of the “Gaza-Jericho first” agreement, deflected the criticism and rejected calls to suspend the peace process. “We know that there are people who want to murder peace, who want to kill Jews,” he said. “There’s no relation between the two. And I don’t believe the Likud or anyone else can stop the flow of history.”

There were strong condemnations of the attack from PLO officials in the occupied territories.

Diab Alouch, head of Arafat’s information department in Gaza City, condemned Hamas, the group that claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement from Jordan, in a telephone call to a Western news agency in Jerusalem and through loudspeakers of mosques in the Gaza Strip.

“Personally, as a Palestinian, this hurts me, what happened in Afula,” Alouch said. “It also hurts me what happened in Jabaliya (where six Arafat activists were slain by an Israeli undercover unit last week) and what happened in Hebron. Everything I hear about killing and the spilling of blood always hurts me.”

Eyewitness accounts of the attack on the Eged Bus Lines commuter coach as it made its second stop on Route No. 438 at 12:10 p.m. Wednesday were chilling enough to shock even people who have lived through this region’s cycles of violence.

A nearby school had just ended classes for the day. Young Jewish students streamed toward the approaching bus for home. Suddenly, the light-blue Opel, which had been parked not far away, blew up. The explosion shook the town.

“When we arrived, the mushroom cloud of smoke was still in the air,” said a firefighter who was the first on the scene, which he described in vivid, gruesome terms. He said the street was covered with oil, seared metal and nails, which police said were packed in the car bomb to maximize its effect.

As of late Wednesday, police said they had managed to identify just four of the seven dead Israelis: the bus driver, two 17-year-old girls and an Arab woman from a nearby village.

The identity of the suicide bomber has not been confirmed. A caller--who said that Hamas was responsible for the attack--identified the car’s driver as Raid Zakarna, 19, from a village just across the Green Line from Afula in the West Bank. The caller said the car contained almost 400 pounds of explosives.

Military sources confirmed that Zakarna was on an Israeli army list of fugitive members of Hamas’ extremist armed wing, the Izzedine al Qassim Brigade. Police said they found a banner denouncing the peace process and a Koran, the Islamic holy book, near the debris of the car.