Inmates are woken between 3am and 6am. All 23 of one cell’s inmates are collectively given five minutes to use the bathroom, which contains four toilets and four basins. It leaves no more than a minute for each prisoner to wash and use the toilet – and if someone takes too long, they are beaten. As a result, some people avoid eating to save time in the toilet every morning.

Breakfast is at about 7am: bread or biscuits served with jam and sometimes cockroaches. Lunch comes at 2pm. “The lunch is rice,” said Khaled. “In most cases, it’s not enough, so they’d bring raw rice and mix it with the cooked rice. Then there was what they called vegetables. Mostly boiled cauliflower – either with a lot of salt, or no salt at all. Three days a week, there was a chicken that wasn’t fit for human consumption, but we had to eat it to keep up our strength.” Dinner is usually beans or lentils.

Inside the cells, Ayman said, there was a bucket for urine and a few blankets for the 20-plus inmates to share. But they did not need to keep warm, even in the winter months. “There was very little ventilation,” said Ayman. “So though this was during the winter, people still wore [just] their underwear and it was very hot.”

The daily routine