The BBC was found to have committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the presenter of a film about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas administrator, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has instructed the BBC to broadcast a peak-time announcement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the BBC to air a message of our determinations against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be finalised," it said.
'Possibility to Damage Confidence'
The authority's announcement declared: "Our probe concluded that the programme's omission to reveal that the presenter's parent occupied a post in the Hamas-run authority was materially misleading.
"It meant that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the presenter and the information he shared.
"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a media organization and its public, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the potential to damage the significantly high degrees of credibility that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was withdrawn from the online platform in February after the presenter's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry found it breached the broadcaster's content policies on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in full. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
