Today’s visitors to Ashkelon carry flak jackets not beach towels

By Nataliya Vasilyeva, Jerusalem Correspondent IN ASHKELON The seaside town of Ashkelon, with its leafy streets and dolphin-shaped fountains, is unmistakably at war. Since Saturday, the seaview rooms of the Regina Doron hotel have been standing empty, except for a few occupied by journalists, who carry flak jackets and helmets with them instead of beach towels. On Wednesday morning I got back to Ashkelon to see for myself how lucky I was the day before. My team and I decided on the spot to drive straight to Jerusalem from a frontline area in the south on Tuesday afternoon after Hamas warned of an impending attack on Ashkelon, which lies about seven miles north of Gaza. A few hours later, we were told our hotel there had received a direct hit. Just a day earlier, the receptionist took me to see their bomb shelter after she was visibly offended when I referred to it as a “basement”. The shelter did indeed look clean and comfortable, with new mattresses on the floor, a big dining table and an offer of 24/7 service of tea and coffee.

Tatyana shows off the Regina Doron’s bomb shelter CREDIT: Nataliya Vasilyeva/The Telegraph

Neither Tatyana, nor anyone else in the hotel was hurt when a Hamas rocket hit a car park just outside the balconies at the back of the hotel. The Regina Goren’s director, who called me the night before to say my car was intact under the luscious palm trees, could not hide the overwhelming sense of fear spreading among Israelis, who were once so confident of its army’s ability to defend them. “I’ve lived in this country for 23 years and have never been that scared in my entire life,” said Denis Leschinsky, in whose hotel 21 out of 46 rooms have been damaged by rocket fire. “I have four children. If it’s just rockets – you go and take shelter in a safe room but when you have gunmen running in the street who can kidnap you and slaughter the kids… This is really scary.” Less than a mile away, Ashkelon’s top hospital is treating a growing number of patients, both civilian and military, and dealing with its own trauma. A passage near the Barzilai hospital’s emergency unit on Wednesday was sealed off with a security tape. A soldier sat on a plastic chair at the entrance of the passage leading to a children’s unit where windows and walls were gutted out by a rocket hit the day before. Air raid sirens wailed three times in less than an hour, sending my team running away along with anyone else from the hospital’s sun-lit terrace to the reinforced hallway of an intensive care unit. Ron Lobel, a thin, elderly man with a white beard, has an improvised office in one of the rooms there as he assumed the responsibilities of director of emergency and disaster management 24 hours after the attack. The 73-year-old doctor is both a first responder and a survivor. On Saturday morning, he was one of several hundred Israelis whose villages were overrun by Hamas terrorists.

Ron Lobel in his makeshift office CREDIT: Natliya Vasilyeva/The Telegraph

The army reached his house in Netiv HaAsara 13 hours after the Hamas attack began. He, his wife and daughter were unscathed, unlike a neighbour who was shot dead in front of his children. The massacare’s survivors were evacuated, and 73-year-old Mr Lobel promptly reported to work. When I asked him where he was living at the moment, he replied: “Here” and pointed to the cot with hospital-issued sheets that my colleague was sitting on. The hospital treated 200 people in two hours on Saturday night, Mr Lobel said, twice as many as it had planned for in its worst-case mass casualty scenario. With a ground invasion of Gaza in the works, the Barzilai is bracing for an influx of wounded. “We’re managing,” Mr Lobel insisted after he said he was turning down offers of help from doctors and nurses abroad. When the interview was over, we stepped outside only to see black smoke rising behind the car park. A rocket from Gaza had fallen next to a supermarket nearby, filling the palm tree-lined streets with the pungent smell of burning plastic.