The British broadcaster engaged in a "serious breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had previously apologised, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has instructed the broadcaster to air a prime-time statement about its decisions.
"As this represents a significant violation of our rules, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a message of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a schedule to be finalised," it said.
'Risk to Damage Confidence'
The regulator's report stated: "Our probe concluded that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father held a role in the Hamas-administered authority was materially misleading.
"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he presented.
"Confidence is at the core of the relationship between a television network and its audience, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the possibility to undermine the exceptionally strong levels of trust that audiences would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was removed from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in this past July an internal BBC review found it infringed the broadcaster's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
