Detainees rounded up from their houses, including several women, under the watchful eyes of regular army soldiers and carabinieri supported by Blackshirts.
[…]
Unfortunately for the detainees, Mussolini’s orders were quite specific; notwithstanding the fact that most of them were being held in locations not capable of sustaining them for more than 24 hours, his instructions were clear: ‘No persons arrested are to be released without my order.’ That meant that—at least until further notice—the vast majority of them would have to remain in detention.
The conditions inside these makeshift detention camps were indeed indescribable, and a significant proportion of the prisoners did not survive. In a telegram to Paris on 24 February, M. Bodard reported that ‘Apart from chiefs and notables, more than 3,000 Ethiopians have been arrested and crammed into small enclosures’, noting that they included women and children, as well as ‘numerous injured’. He added that by that date around 1,000 executions of these captives had been carried out.65
(Emphasis added. Source.)