The public service broadcaster committed a "major breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the film was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has instructed the broadcaster to transmit a prime-time statement about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our rules, we are directing the corporation to transmit a message of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a schedule to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Damage Credibility'
The watchdog's announcement stated: "Our investigation found that the programme's failure to disclose that the presenter's father served in a role in the Hamas-run authority was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their assessment of the presenter and the information he shared.
"Credibility is at the core of the connection between a broadcaster and its viewers, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the potential to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of trust that audiences would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was removed from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the presenter's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it infringed the organization's content policies on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."
