The British broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the voice of a documentary about Gaza was the son of a Hamas representative, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has directed the corporation to air a prime-time declaration about its conclusions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a message of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Undermine Credibility'
The watchdog's announcement stated: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the programme's omission to reveal that the narrator's male guardian served in a post in the Hamas-run administration was materially misleading.
"This implied that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the voice and the content he presented.
"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the potential to damage the very considerable degrees of trust that audiences would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was withdrawn from the online platform in February after the narrator's familial connections were revealed, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it violated the organization's content policies on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
