Ashkelon, İsrail Güncel Saati — IST.

Ashkelon or Ashqelon, is a coastal city in the Southern District of Israel on the Mediterranean coast, 50 kilometres (30 mi) south of Tel Aviv, and 13 kilometres (8 mi) north of the border with the Gaza Strip. The modern city is named after the ancient seaport of Ascalon, which was destroyed in 1270 and whose remains are on the southwestern edge of the modern metropolis. The Israeli city, first known as Migdal, was founded in 1949 approximately 4 km inland from ancient Ascalon at the Palestinian town of al-Majdal. Its inhabitants had been exclusively Muslims and Christians, and the area had been allocated to Palestine in the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine; on the eve of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War the inhabitants numbered 10,000 and in October 1948, the city accommodated thousands more Palestinian refugees from nearby villages. The town was conquered by Israeli forces on 5 November 1948, by which time much of the Arab population had fled, leaving some 2700 inhabitants, of whom Israeli soldiers deported 500 in December 1948, and most of the rest were deported by 1950. Today, the city's population is almost entirely Israeli Jews.

Distance-wise, Ashkelon is closest to Dubai (~2,144 km), London (~3,577 km), Singapore (~7,974 km); Sydney is the far end at roughly 14,183 km. That ordering matters more than the timezone label for travel planning.

Ashkelon sits inside İsrail — the Western Asia subregion, capital Jerusalem, languages Arabic, Hebrew, currency ILS (₪).

Around Ashkelon, the nearest mapped reference cities are Bayt Ḩānūn (15 km), Bayt Lāhyā (15 km), Ashdod (16 km), Sderot (16 km); treat them as the de-facto regional cluster for IST planning.

In 2015, A baseball game between the Baltimore Orioles and the Chicago White Sox sets the all-time low attendance mark for Major League Baseball. Zero fans were in attendance for the game, as the stadium was officially closed to the public due to the 2015 Baltimore protests.