A: It was beyond that, even.
Q: What's beyond that?
A: Beyond that, I mean, it was all the instruction that we received, I mean, what is the instruction, Paul Yaakov gave the order to take down the entire floor, which is a living room and a bedroom that was next to and a corridor, all this area.
Q: Where does it appear? All this thing you're telling us right now
A: All the floor we built
Q: Where's Paul, where's the instruction to get you down the floor of a bedroom? Can you show me that?
A: It's not a bedroom, it was like he pointed out it's the parallel area
Q: To the basement.
A: To the basement, right?
Q: I get it.
A: He marked our floor for the entire area that belonged to the basement.
- She also notes that throughout their years of living in the apartment, they were not even aware of the space under their apartment: "Q: Okay. This basement, when was it actually created? What happened when you came to live there in the basement?
00T: Look, this is an area that we didn't even know existed, because you know we bought an apartment, we bought an apartment and this was our apartment, I was until that moment when the contractor saw that out of this hole that he started removing the tiles the hole was growing and the sand seeped in and that's it, I can't accept the responsibility from that moment I realized that there is room under me, I mean, it's not like with the other neighbors, it's a floor, it's a ground floor, so ground floor is next to the ground, and then I realized after he had no possibility of coming and seeing what was there until the moment he opened it and lit up the floor with his mobile phone, so we realized that there was a space underneath us." (p. 11, lines 20-26 of the transcript).
- The witness recounted how the discovery of the space under their apartment occurred randomly and unplanned, forcing them to make a large financial investment for the repair following the instructions of the municipality's engineer. When asked in cross-examination about the warehouse that was built under her house as an addition, she replied that it was built for a significant period before the renovation work that is the subject of this lawsuit. At the same time, she noted that there is no connection between the warehouse they built and the space discovered in the works.
- Kravchik, an engineer on behalf of the plaintiffs, testified that he did not examine the permit for the warehouse that the couple built, but that the area in which it was built is not relevant to the area where the problem occurred. In addition, he noted that from the tests and examinations he conducted, he understood that the ground floor of the plaintiffs' apartment was poured with a thickness of only 5 centimeters and therefore cracked, along with the sand that they had filled the floor and had sunk over the years, in contravention of the permit in the project, which requires a floor thickness of 20 cm. However, he examined the place on a specific basis and did not perform an examination to examine whether the entire floor was built using the same method.
- Lev Nisman, another engineer on behalf of the plaintiffs who submitted an affidavit to the case, testified that he arrived at the apartment shortly after discovering the problem, the floor was of the 'lying' and non-hanging floor type as it was supposed to be and was supposed to be at least 17 cm thick and not as thick as it was (page 36, lines 32-33 of the transcript), and also testifies that when he arrived at the scene, they opened an opening in the wall for him so that he could see the space and the work that was carried out was in the plaintiffs' apartment and no work was done in the space at all and it was full In sand and rock. According to him, he told the plaintiffs that a more experienced engineer should be brought to the site and reinforcements should be carried out (page 37, lines 1-25 of the transcript).
- Eli Benwalid, the defendants' engineer, testified that according to his opinion, the creation of the space was carried out after the construction of the building and required excavation and quarrying work for this purpose, and further claimed that the floor is a lying floor. These conclusions are based on static calculations he found on the municipality's website. After presenting the plan of the apartment to him during the cross-examination, he testified that the plan showed a suspended floor. In other words, the photographs according to which he concluded that it was a lying floor, show a different situation than the one described in the approved plans of the apartment.
- Eli Arkin, an engineer on behalf of the defendants, testified that an excavation was carried out under the apartment, which led to the creation of a higher space than it was when the original wall was poured, but he does not have information about the original construction of the building.
The parties' summaries: