The BBC engaged in a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the son 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 found that the film was "significantly deceptive".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has instructed the corporation to air a peak-time declaration about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our regulations, we are ordering the broadcaster to transmit a message of our findings against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a schedule to be determined," the statement read.
'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'
The authority's report stated: "Our investigation concluded that the programme's failure to disclose that the presenter's father occupied a role in the Hamas-controlled administration was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Trust is at the core of the connection between a broadcaster and its viewers, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the possibility to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that the public would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in February after the narrator's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an internal BBC review determined it violated the organization's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the authority's determination in complete. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the date and language are determined."
