A U.S.-based pro-Muslim group blasted President Biden after he expressed "no confidence" in the Palestinian death toll figures reported by Hamas. 

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) condemned what they called "shocking and dehumanizing" remarks made by Biden during a press conference with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Wednesday. 

At the White House, Biden rejected a question posed by PBS correspondent Laura Barrón-López about the Palestinian death count provided by the terrorist group Hamas, saying he has "no confidence" such numbers are truthful.

"We are deeply disturbed and shocked by the dehumanizing comments that President Biden made about the almost 7,000 Palestinians slaughtered by the Israeli government over the past two weeks," CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad said in a statement. 

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"The Israeli government has openly admitted that it is targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure. Journalists have confirmed the high number of casualties, and countless videos coming out of Gaza every day show mangled bodies of Palestinian women and children — and entire city blocks leveled to the ground. President Biden should watch some of these videos and ask himself if the crushed children being dragged out of the ruins of their family homes are a fabrication or an acceptable price of war. They are neither," Awad continued. 

He demanded an apology from Biden and called on the president to "condemn the Israeli government for deliberately targeting civilians, and demand a ceasefire before more innocent people die." 

Reached for comment, the White House noted that the president, in his answer and in his opening remarks, reiterated the importance of avoiding any Palestinian civilian casualties. Biden has repeatedly said the loss of innocent Palestinian life is a tragedy. 

During a joint press conference Wednesday alongside Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Barrón-López attempted to press Biden on whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was keeping his word of limiting civilian casualties in Israel's response to the horrific Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas. 

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"In the 18 days since Hamas killed 1,400 Israelis, the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry says Israeli forces have killed over 6,000 Palestinians, including 2,700 children," Barrón-López said. "You've previously asked Netanyahu to minimize civilian casualties. Do these numbers say to you that he's ignoring that message?"

"What they say to me is I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed," Biden responded.

Biden continued, "I'm sure innocents have been killed, and it's the price of waging a war. I think we should be incredibly careful… Israel should be incredibly careful to be sure that they're focusing on going after the folks that are the propagating this war against Israel. And it's against their interest when that doesn't happen. But I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using."

Last week, several news organizations rushed to report claims made by the Gaza Health Ministry that Israel bombed al-Ahli Baptist Hospital through an airstrike resulting in over 500 civilian casualties. 

Subsequent reporting and intelligence found it was an explosion in the hospital's parking lot stemming from a misfired rocket fired by Hamas ally Islamic Jihad, resulting in a death toll a fraction of what Hamas had first alleged.

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CAIR, the largest Muslim advocacy group in the nation, has faced controversy for its alleged ties to Islamic extremist groups. 

In 2009, the FBI severed its once-close ties to CAIR amid mounting evidence that the group had links to a support network for Hamas.

Local chapters of CAIR were shunned in the wake of a 15-year FBI investigation that culminated in the conviction of Hamas fundraisers at a trial in which CAIR itself was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator.

The United Arab Emirates named CAIR a terrorist organization in 2014. 

In a statement on its website in May 2013, CAIR rejected suggestions it had links to terrorism.

"CAIR is not is [sic] 'the Wahhabi lobby,' a 'front group for Hamas,' a 'fundraising arm for Hezbollah,' '...part of a wider conspiracy overseen by the Muslim Brotherhood...' or any of the other false and misleading associations our detractors seek to smear us with," the organization said. "That we stand accused of being both a 'fundraising arm of Hezbollah' and the 'Wahhabi lobby' is a significant point in demonstrating that our detractors are hurling slander, not fact. Hezbollah and the Salafi (Wahhabi) movement represent diametrically opposed ideologies."

Fox News Digital's Joseph A. Wulfsohn and Gregg Re contributed to this report.

There are stories in the human bones at the American Museum of Natural History. They tell of lives lived — some mere decades ago, others in past centuries — in cultures around the world.

But the vast collection of thousands of skeletal parts at one of the world's most visited museums also tells a darker story – of opened graves, disrupted burial sites and collecting practices that treated some cultures and people as objects to be gawked at.

The New York museum announced this month that it is pulling all human remains from public display and will change how it maintains its collection of body parts with the aim of eventually repatriating as much as it can and respectfully holding what it can’t.

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The museum now holds around 12,000 sets of remains, including the bones of Indigenous people and enslaved Black people, often amassed in the 19th and 20th centuries by researchers looking to prove theories about racial superiority and inferiority through physical attributes.

Some of the other remains are people — likely poor or powerless — whose bodies had once been used at medical schools before they were given to the museum as recently as the 1940s.

American Museum of Natural History President Sean Decatur, who in April became the museum’s first Black leader, said that for the most part, the remains in the collection were acquired without clear consent of the dead or their descendants.

"I think it’s fair to say that none of these people set out or imagined that their resting place would be in the museum’s collection," he said. "And in most of the cases, there also was a clear differential in power between those who were collecting and those who were collected."

The process of pulling human remains from public display will impact six of the museum's galleries. Objects being removed include a musical instrument made from human bone, a skeleton from Mongolia that is more than a thousand years old and a Tibetan artifact that incorporates bones.

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The idea that human remains and artifacts taken from other cultures should be returned is not new. A U.S. law passed in 1990 created a legal process for some Native tribes to recover ancestral remains from museums and other institutions. In a letter to museum staff, Decatur said about 2,200 sets of remains at the museum fall under that category.

Other museums and institutions are grappling with the issue as well. At the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, for example, more than 100 human remains have been returned to the relevant communities. The museum is working to return four other sets of remains that don't fall under the federal law's purview.

"Fundamentally, we have a responsibility to do more than acknowledge the harm caused by historical collecting practices that treated peoples and cultures as objects of scientific study," Chris Patrello, curator of anthropology at the museum, said in an email.

In 2022, an estimated 870,000 Native American artifacts, including remains that should be returned to tribes under federal law are still in possession of colleges, museums, and other institutions across the country, according to The Associated Press.

But it's not just Indigenous remains being in museum collections that are troubling.

Decatur said some of the remains in the museum are believed to be of five Black people whose bones were removed from a northern Manhattan burial ground during a road construction project at the start of the 1900s.

"Enslavement was a violent, dehumanizing act; removing these remains from their rightful burial place ensured that the denial of basic human dignity would continue even in death," Decatur said in his letter to the museum staff.

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Historically, Black graves have been subjected to robbery, said Lynn Rainville, a professor of anthropology at Washington and Lee University. They have also been covered over or disrupted in construction and development projects.

Decatur said the American Museum of Natural History's holdings also include about 400 bodies that came from four New York medical schools in the 1940s, even though there’s no obvious process by which bodies used for medical training in anatomy should have ended up in a museum.

One of the medical schools no longer exists; the others were connected to Columbia, Cornell and New York University. Columbia’s medical school had no comment. The other two did not respond to emails seeking information. Museum officials said they were talking with the schools and as far as they had been able to determine, the bodies had not come to the institution in any nefarious way.

"It’s one of those things that is jarring and sort of ... hits closer to home than an archeological expedition that’s looking at things that are a thousand-plus years old. But it’s a practice that was incredibly common" at the time, Decatur said.

Susan Lederer, professor of medical history and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin’s medical school, said that as the number of medical schools increased in the 19th century and dissection became an essential part of training, schools needed to find more cadavers.

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States passed laws making unclaimed bodies, mostly of very poor people, available to medical schools.

"It reflects longstanding assumptions about the differences between middle-class and either working-class or underclass people" that it was deemed acceptable to turn certain bodies over but not others, she said.

The practice at most medical schools shifted in the second half of the 20th century for a number of reasons, including more people in the U.S. being willing to donate their bodies after death, she said.

The museum's process of figuring out how to handle those and other remains in storage will take some time, Decatur said. Officials will need to determine what can be returned and to whom, as well as how to properly care for any remains that stay behind.