The British broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas official, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has ordered the broadcaster to broadcast a prime-time declaration about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our regulations, we are instructing the BBC to transmit a message of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a timing to be finalised," it said.
'Potential to Damage Trust'
The authority's report declared: "Our probe determined that the programme's lack of disclosure that the presenter's father held a post in the Hamas-administered authority was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the public did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he shared.
"Trust is at the center of the connection between a television network and its viewers, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the potential to damage the significantly high degrees of credibility that viewers would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was withdrawn from iPlayer in last February after the boy's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an internal BBC review found it violated the corporation's content policies on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"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 date and language are determined."
