The British broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas official, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has instructed the BBC to air a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our code, we are instructing the broadcaster to transmit a message of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a schedule to be finalised," the statement read.
'Potential to Erode Confidence'
The watchdog's report declared: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the film's omission to reveal that the voice's father held a post in the Hamas-administered authority was materially misleading.
"It meant that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the voice and the information he provided.
"Credibility is at the heart of the connection between a broadcaster and its viewers, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the risk to erode the significantly high degrees of trust that audiences would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was removed from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it infringed the organization's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a significant failing in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which reflects Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in complete. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
