Ashkelon

Ashkelon is one of the world's oldest continuously inhabited coastal cities, with documented settlement stretching back to the early Bronze Age, around the late second millennium BC. It was a major center of Philistine civilization and appears repeatedly in the Hebrew Bible — most notably in stories connected to Samson and the Sea Peoples. During the Crusades the city changed hands multiple times and served as a fortified stronghold; Ottoman layers later accumulated over the ancient strata. Today, Ashkelon National Park preserves excavated ruins from Canaanite, Philistine, Hellenistic, and Roman periods, making it a site of significant archaeological interest on Israel's southern Mediterranean coast.