Jailed Tunisian opposition leader Rached Ghannouchi fainted inside Mornaguia prison on July 23, 2026, as temperatures in his cell block reached 52 degrees Celsius (126 degrees Fahrenheit), according to an eyewitness account published by Al Jazeera.

The account comes from Haifa Chebbi, daughter of imprisoned opposition politician Ahmed Nejib Chebbi. She posted a Facebook live video describing what she saw during a prison visit. Chebbi said detainees are kept in cells no larger than 16 square metres (172 square feet) — roughly the size of a parking space — and are allowed only two hours per day outside them. She named several other imprisoned opposition figures held under the same conditions, including Abir Moussi, Ayachi Hammami, Ziad El Hani, and Chaima Issa.

Ghannouchi, 85, has been in prison since 2023. He is the former parliament speaker and leader of the Ennahda party, a political group with roots in Islamist activism. He has faced an escalating series of sentences. A Tunisian court gave him a 14-year prison term in July 2025. His defense team reported on April 15, 2026 that a 20-year sentence had been imposed on him and other activists. On June 3, 2026, a Tunisian court sentenced Ghannouchi to life in prison.

His health has repeatedly gotten worse in detention. On April 30, 2026, Ennahda announced that Ghannouchi had suffered a sharp decline and was urgently moved from prison to hospital, as reported by Reuters and Middle East Monitor. He was later sent back to Mornaguia prison.

Ahmed Nejib Chebbi, 81, helped establish the National Salvation Front (FSN) in 2022. The FSN is a coalition of opposition groups formed to challenge the government. He was among 37 opposition figures sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2025 on charges of "conspiracy against state security." UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said the imprisonment of those 37 defendants was "a setback to justice and rule of law," noting that the trials had fair trial violations — meaning the legal proceedings did not meet basic standards for a just trial, such as proper access to lawyers and impartial judges.

The broader context here matters for understanding what is at stake. Since 2021, Tunisia's president, Kais Saied, has suspended parliament and taken on executive authority himself. That has created a widening gap between the government and an opposition that once worked within the country's democratic system. The fact that so many senior opposition figures are held in one prison, under conditions that observers call physically dangerous, raises questions that go beyond any one person's health. Ghannouchi's age, his repeated hospital stays, and the reported cell conditions at Mornaguia together form a pattern that international human rights groups are likely to examine further, especially given Turk's earlier criticism.

The defense team's April 15 statement also addressed the detention of lawyer and human rights defender Ayachi Hammami. It said Tunisian authorities detained him to enforce a five-year sentence based on what the statement called false accusations.

Among the figures named in Chebbi's video, Abir Moussi's situation stands out. Her lawyer, Nafaa Laribi, told the Associated Press that Moussi still intends to run in the October 6, 2026 Tunisian presidential election. If she follows through, it would test whether someone can run for president from inside a prison cell.

The Al Jazeera report on the July 23 incident is the original news account. It draws directly on Haifa Chebbi's first-hand description posted as a Facebook live video, not on another news outlet's reporting. The report does not include a response from Tunisian prison authorities or the government about the conditions described.

What comes next will likely depend on whether the health incidents at Mornaguia draw sustained international attention, and whether Tunisia's courts and prison system face renewed pressure over detention conditions, the legal cases that put these figures in prison, and the approaching presidential election in which at least one jailed candidate has said she plans to take part.