In Tajoura detention center’s administration block, there is an isolation room, where detainees who try to escape are abused and interrogated. At the end of May, there was a crackdown on communications in Tajoura. Three men were taken away by guards and tortured. One later sent me photos showing wounds on his hands and legs, saying he was electrocuted and forced to name others who had been sending messages to journalists and activists.

On June 21, two men who tried to escape Tajoura were killed, according to detainees who knew them. Aid workers, speaking anonymously, confirmed there had been an incident that day, but couldn’t say whether anyone died. Many of those locked up are refugees, who have fled war-torn African countries or brutal dictatorships and can’t return home.

The renewed fighting has worsened the situation but deaths in Libyan detention centers aren’t all related to the civil war. Between mid-September and late May, at least 22 refugees and migrants died after being locked up without enough food, water and medical care in Zintan detention center, 110 miles southwest of Tripoli. According to an internal United Nations report that was leaked to me, more than 80 percent of detainees in Zintan could have tuberculosis. Most haven’t been tested.

Instead of moving them to a hospital, some of the critically ill detainees at Zintan camp were moved to a detention center in Gharyan, the front line of the fighting between the government and General Hifter’s forces. Management had complained the corpses of Christians were piling up, as there was no provision for non-Muslim burials in Zintan.

An Eritrean man, who is being held in Zintan, told me four men and boys tried to kill themselves by grabbing electrical wires. In April, Meron, a 17-year-old Eritrean boy, killed himself by jumping into a septic tank in Abu Salim detention center in southern Tripoli. Meron had fled indefinite military service and a litany of human rights abuses in Eritrea. It took the other detainees — men, women, and children from Sudan and Somalia — more than 30 minutes to get his body out.

On April 23, fighters aligned with the government forces opened fire on refugees and migrants as they prayed at Qasr Bin Ghashir detention center in southern Tripoli, killing several. Detainees there had refused to move to the Zintan detention center, believing it was better to die quickly than suffer a slow death caused by neglect and starvation. At the Tajoura detention center, detainees have been worried about attacks for months.

On Wednesday morning, a 26-year-old from Darfur, Sudan, who is being held at Tajoura detention camp, messaged me. “This is the world, my sister,” he said. “I am in the house of the slaughter. The European Union and the High Commissioner for Refugees must bear responsibility for this massacre.”