The BBC was found to have committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas official, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has instructed the broadcaster to air a prime-time declaration about its findings.
"As this represents a significant violation of our regulations, we are instructing the broadcaster to broadcast a message of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a timing to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Damage Credibility'
The authority's statement declared: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the film's omission to reveal that the presenter's male guardian served in a role in the Hamas-administered administration was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the voice and the content he presented.
"Trust is at the core of the connection between a broadcaster and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the potential to erode the exceptionally strong degrees of confidence that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the narrator's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the corporation's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in its entirety. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the date and wording are determined."
