The public service broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the narrator of a film about the Gaza situation 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 programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has directed the BBC to air a peak-time declaration about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our code, we are ordering the broadcaster to air a statement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a date to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Damage Credibility'
The authority's announcement said: "Our investigation found that the film's omission to reveal that the narrator's father served in a position in the Hamas-run government was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their assessment of the voice and the details he provided.
"Credibility is at the heart of the connection between a television network and its public, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the potential to undermine the exceptionally strong amounts of confidence that viewers would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was withdrawn from the online platform in last February after the boy's personal associations were revealed, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it infringed the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which reflects clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the date and language are determined."
