The British broadcaster committed a "major breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has instructed the corporation to broadcast a prime-time statement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our rules, we are directing the BBC to air a announcement of our determinations against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," the statement read.
'Risk to Undermine Credibility'
The regulator's report declared: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the film's lack of disclosure that the narrator's male guardian served in a position in the Hamas-administered administration was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the narrator and the details he provided.
"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its viewers, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This failing had the potential to erode the very considerable amounts of trust that the public would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was removed from the online platform in February after the presenter's family links came to light, and in this past July an internal BBC review determined it infringed the organization's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the authority's determination in its entirety. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."
