The British broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a film about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas official, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has instructed the corporation to air a peak-time declaration about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our regulations, we are directing the corporation to broadcast a announcement of our determinations against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be finalised," it said.
'Possibility to Damage Trust'
The authority's statement said: "The inquiry we conducted found that the film's omission to reveal that the voice's father served in a post in the Hamas-controlled authority was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their judgment of the voice and the content he presented.
"Trust is at the heart of the relationship between a broadcaster and its viewers, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the potential to undermine the significantly high amounts of trust that viewers would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was removed from the online platform in last February after the presenter's familial connections emerged, and in July an internal BBC review found it violated the organization's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in full. We will comply with the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."
