The British broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a film about Gaza was the child of a Hamas official, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has ordered the BBC to broadcast a prime-time announcement about its findings.
"As this represents a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the corporation to air a announcement of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be finalised," it said.
'Possibility to Undermine Trust'
The authority's announcement said: "Our probe found that the programme's omission to reveal that the presenter's parent served in a post in the Hamas-run authority was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the audience did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their assessment of the presenter and the content he shared.
"Trust is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its public, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the possibility to undermine the very considerable amounts of trust that audiences would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."
The film was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the boy's familial connections came to light, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry determined it infringed the organization's content policies on truthfulness.
A corporation official commented: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
