The BBC was found to have committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a film about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas official, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has ordered the corporation to air a prime-time statement about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the BBC to transmit a announcement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Potential to Damage Confidence'
The watchdog's announcement declared: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the narrator's parent held a post in the Hamas-administered government was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the audience did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the voice and the content he presented.
"Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the possibility to erode the exceptionally strong levels of credibility that viewers would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was withdrawn from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's family links came to light, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry determined it infringed the organization's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which reflects Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are determined."
