
Ashkelon, also known as Ascalon, is a coastal city in the Southern District of Israel, located on the Mediterranean coast 30 miles south of Tel Aviv and 8 miles north of the Gaza Strip. Tel Ashkelon was founded in 2000 BC as a Canaanite city-state, and the city was conquered by the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III (r. 1479-1425 BC), remaining under Egyptian control into the Bronze Age. Pharaoh Merneptah crushed a rebellion in Ashkelon in 1208 BC, but control of the city passed to the Philistines in 1150 BC, whether through conquest or Pharaoh Ramesses III's resettlement of captive Sea People in Canaan. Ascalon became one of the five cities of the Philistine Pentapolis alongside Gaza, Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath, and the city's Temple of Venus was plundered by the Scythians during the 7th century BC and fell to the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II in 604 BC. After the Achaemenid conquest, Ascalon's inhabitants were influenced by the dominant Persian culture before becoming a Hellenistic "free city" after Alexander the Great's conquest of the Levant in the 4th century BC. Ascalon remained loyal to Rome during the First Jewish-Roman War, and it later became the sesat of a Christian bishopric. Ascalon was one of the last Byzantine cities to fall to the Rashidun Arabs in 640 AD, after which its was briefly reconquered by the Byzantines during the Second Fitna before the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan reconquered it. A mosque was built in 772 AD, and Ascalon became a naval base for Fatimid Egypt. In 1099, the Crusaders defeated the Fatimids at the Battle of Ascalon, but Ascalon remained a major Fatimid frontier post until King Baldwin III of Jerusalem conquered the city at the Siege of Ascalon in 1153. Saladin took Ascalon in 1187 and demolished the strategic fortress in 1191 to deny its use to the Crusaders, but Richard I of England built a new citadel upon the ruins. The Egyptians retook Ascalon in 1247, only for the Mamluks to destroy the citadel and harbor in 1270 to forestall future Crusader invasions. Ascalon was reduced to a small village of 300 inhabitants by 1863, and its inhabitants were primarily Muslim. Ascalon evolved into the Palestinian village of al-Majdal, which had 10,000 residents in 1948. The town was occupied by Israeli forces on 5 November 1948, by which time much of the Arab population had fled. By 1950, most of the Arabs were deported, and the city was refounded in 1953 with an almost entirely Jewish population consisting of immigrants and demobilized soldiers. By 2021, Ashkelon had a population of 149,160 people.