The BBC committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the narrator of a film about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas official, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The authority has directed the corporation to transmit a prime-time statement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the BBC to broadcast a statement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Damage Confidence'
The authority's announcement stated: "Our probe found that the film's lack of disclosure that the presenter's male guardian held a post in the Hamas-administered administration was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the voice and the information he presented.
"Trust is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its viewers, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the risk to undermine the exceptionally strong amounts of credibility that the public would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the narrator's personal associations emerged, and in the month of July an internal BBC review concluded it breached the corporation's content policies on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the authority's determination in its entirety. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
