During his interrogation in court, Doctori testified that he had examined the possibility that the suspicious organization was the one that created the videos (pp. 44, 15-16, and later on at p. 50), but he was unable to reach evidence linking the suspected organization to the publications (pp. 52, 11-26), despite his extensive experience in the field of cyber investigations (pp. 53, 11-17). Doctori also testified, at p. 38:
"Information, that is, to bring information is evidence. I, my job according to the law is to collect, inform or prepare evidence. We did not find evidence linking a party, organization, person, in Israel, in the world, to the publications. We couldn't get there... Zero evidence."
Doctori further stated that as a rule in investigations, when it comes to private individuals who do not have a large body behind them, they can be located because "we find the points where they are negligent," but in this case there was a process of concealment and false identities that brought him, even after hard work, to a dead end, and their location is possible only with the means available to the police and state informants (pp. 69-70).
- The plaintiff himself also testified in court that he certainly suspects Rabbis Zamir Cohen and Yigal Cohen of being behind the campaign, but he is not sure of this, because if he had been sure of this, he would have sued them. He also testified at pp. 98-99 that he does not think of filing a lawsuit and then bringing evidence:
"It's a stupid method. Who starts like this?... What do I submit if I don't have evidence? There's a person who was hired for this and couldn't bring it, what can I do? I did everything I could... As much as I can."
- Google and Meta also claimed that there was a failure in that Doctori was not asked to personally investigate whether these parties were the ones who published the publications.
This argument should be rejected. A private investigator is not a man of authority and is not allowed to investigate concrete people. Given the totality of the circumstances, I got the impression that Doctori did his best to trace the creators of the publications, with the tools at his disposal, and that this was a reasonable effort.