Two Palestinian cabinet ministers have tendered their resignations, political sources said yesterday, in a new blow to a government beset by militants demanding reform in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

"I have reached a point where I can do nothing amid all this ongoing chaos and unrest. Unfortunately, the situation is deteriorating by the day," lustice Minister Nahed Al-Reyes told Reuters, saying he tendered his resignation Wednesday and was awaiting confirmation from Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie.

Senior Palestinian political

sources said Planning Minister Nabil Qasis had also resigned after accepting an offer to become president of a West Bank university.

Qasis and Qurie did not immediately comment.

Palestinian areas have been rocked by upheaval in the past few weeks, including kidnappings, street protests and gun battles between militants and security forces — the gravest internal challenge yet to President Yasser Arafat and Qurie.

The Palestinian leadership is under intense international pressure to clean up corruption and reform its security apparatus, which it accuses

Israel of destroying during four years of conflict.

AFP adds: A Palestinian teenager was shot dead by Israeli troops close to the Sufa border crossing in the southern Gaza Strip early Saturday, Palestinian hospital sources told AFP.

The youth was named as 16-year-old Ahmad al-Qiyq, a family member said.

An army spokesman said two unarmed Palestinians had been spotted near the security fence in Sufa in an area, which is off-limits to non-military personnel, so they opened fire, killing one. The second was taken for investigation.

The youth's death brought to 4,222 the overall toll since the September 2000 launch of the intifada, or Palestinian uprising, including 3,225 Palestinians and 926 Israelis, according to an AFP tally.

Four Palestinian militants from the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades were arrested by Israeli troops early Saturday during an army incursion in the northern West Bank town of Tulkarem, Palestinian security sources reported.

One of them was named as Abud Shreim, 28, the Tulkarem area leader of the Brigades, a group which is loosely allied to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement.

Clashes broke out shortly after dawn when around 25 army jeeps and tanks pushed into the town and surrounded a number of houses, the sources said, and witnesses reported hearing several loud explosions.

The army confirmed the four arrests in Tulkarem, but said only one of them belonged to Al Aqsa, while the other three were operatives from the radical Hamas movement.

A spokeswoman said troops had uncovered a weapons cache hidden in one of the Hamas activists' homes, containing 19 explosive devices, a rifle and ammunition.