The BBC engaged in a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about Gaza was the child of a Hamas representative, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has instructed the BBC to air a peak-time statement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our code, we are directing the broadcaster to air a statement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," the statement read.
'Risk to Damage Trust'
The authority's report said: "Our investigation concluded that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's father occupied a position in the Hamas-administered authority was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the voice and the content he presented.
"Trust is at the center of the relationship between a media organization and its public, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the risk to undermine the exceptionally strong amounts of trust that viewers would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was removed from the online platform in last February after the narrator's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry determined it breached the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A corporation official commented: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the schedule and language are determined."
