It should be recalled that Ruthie Arnon is an elderly woman, who saw what happened to her husband for a few seconds, while he was stabbed repeatedly by two men. In light of the vigorous conduct of the two, it was reasonable to think that their action was the action of two young men, and in the videos filmed during the incident, the defendant appears to be incomparably younger than is currently being portrayed.
This is the place to note that during the course of the legal proceedings it seemed that the defendant made every possible effort not to appear "young", knowing and knowing Ruthie Arnon's words, to which he even found himself referring time and time again during his testimony. We would not be wrong if we note that the defendant gained weight, grew a thick white beard, made sure to use a straw, and so on and so forth, which cannot be reconciled with the definition of "young."
Let's face it, the image of the defendant reflected in the videos from the period of the incident (when he was in Eliran Sabag's car lot and in the compound of Rafi Abdayev's business, including in his first interrogations, in the first month after the murder), is completely different from his character as it is today. It would not be a sin if we say that the two seem to be separated by an abyss that is about twenty years old. In the videos, the defendant appears to be no more than fifty years old, but before our eyes he now appears to be over the age of seventy. True, more than a month later, investigators came to Ruthie Arnon's home in order to ask her one and only question, why she had said that they were two young men in the first place. In our view, they should have contacted her much earlier, they should have documented the encounter, documented the conversation that preceded the collection of the statement (if there was one), and documented the interrogation itself, since, as the defense claims, this is the only eyewitness to the murder, and a very limited description that it used explicitly, since it did not detail almost anything about the identity of the murderers, except that they were young. The fact that the interrogation was not documented (testimony of Fouad Fares, 13 December 2022, pp. 1548 ff.) is a disturbing fact, but after we heard Ruthie Arnon and were impressed by her in an unmediated manner (2 May 2022, p. 31, paras. 20 onwards), we came to the conclusion that her words were true. She believed that they were two young men in view of the behavior and conduct of the two, and this is what she said when she was questioned by the investigators who came to her home. There is no evidentiary basis for the claim that the words were put in Ruthie Arnon's mouth in view of the identity and age of the defendant, who had been detained at the time for many days.