Israel was among the first countries to send earthquake assistance to Turkey, and currently has close to 400 rescue workers and medical staff there. But in Israel, there is a growing chorus of dismay that too little, too late, has been done - for Israeli holidaymakers who were caught up in the quake.

About a dozen Israelis are missing, and feared dead, in the collapse of buildings at the Turkish resort town of Chiben Shik. But Israeli rescue teams only started work at the scene on Thursday - having initially been directed to a Turkish naval base outside Istanbul - because the Israeli Foreign Ministry originally announced that no Israelis had been harmed in the earthquake.

One Israeli woman, Ms Irish Franko, freed herself from the rubble of a seven-storey building at Chiben Shik after a 36-hour struggle, but her husband and nine-year-old twins are among those missing and presumed dead. The Israeli rescue workers have extricated the bodies of one Israeli couple, the Krupkins.

Israel's Foreign Minister, Mr David Levy, is said to have ordered his ministry's director-general, Mr Eitan Bentsur, to conduct an inquiry as to why the ministry disseminated the erroneous information about there being no Israeli victims. The ministry erred a second time by distributing a subsequent list of missing Israelis that included people known to be safe.

But Mr Bentsur is understood to have gone off on holiday on Thursday, his aides say they know nothing about an impending inquiry, and Mr Levy is also saying little.

Families of the missing Israelis are livid at the fiasco and what they call the ministry's incompetence.

Ms Etti Malach, whose elderly parents are believed to be in the rubble of the collapsed buildings at Chiben Shik, about 100 miles south-west of Istanbul, said that she telephoned the ministry within hours of the quake on Tuesday, but that "the telephone operator treated us indifferently, as though we were just hysterical."

Ms Sheli Elyakim said that she called the ministry incessantly through Tuesday and Wednesday - at a time when its officials were blithely issuing assurances that no Israelis were involved - to report that her relatives were missing at the scene.

Ministry spokesmen claim that they took 10,000 calls from worried Israelis in the aftermath of the quake, and therefore couldn't give all callers detailed attention. They add that their mission in Istanbul checked all hotels in the city and found no Israelis affected, and had no information on the Israelis missing at Chiben Shik until Wednesday - at which point Israeli rescue teams were ordered to head for the resort.

The uproar over the delays in dealing with Israeli victims has overshadowed the rescue work of the Israeli army's National Rescue Unit, which sent 150 members to Turkey within hours of the quake, and focused its efforts on two collapsed buildings at the Golcuk naval base. Neither building had been constructed with reinforcements to minimise earthquake damage, so there were few survivors, but the Israelis did get one man out alive - managing to free him from the metal leg of a bed that had pinned him down, deep in the wreckage.

The unit, comprising ex-combat soldiers who volunteer to stay on 24-hour call for such disaster work, is among the most experienced in the world, with a team of dogs trained to sniff out buried bodies, high-tech listening devices, and inflatable air pillows for carefully raising concrete.

The fact that Israel has such expertise, relatives of the missing Israelis charge, only makes it worse that the unit was not originally despatched to the site where Israeli lives might have been saved.

Asked a relative of Mr Yehiel and Ms Roza Avinoam, an elderly Israeli couple still missing, "If we send an Israeli rescue team, shouldn't they first try to save Israelis?"