The BBC engaged in a "significant breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the voice of a documentary about Gaza was the son of a Hamas administrator, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom 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 previously apologised, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has ordered the broadcaster to transmit a prime-time statement about its conclusions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our rules, we are ordering the corporation to air a announcement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a schedule to be determined," the statement read.
'Possibility to Undermine Credibility'
The authority's announcement declared: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the documentary's failure to disclose that the narrator's parent occupied a post in the Hamas-run government was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the voice and the information he provided.
"Trust is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its viewers, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the possibility to erode the very considerable degrees of credibility that audiences would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was pulled from the online platform in last February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it breached the organization's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The authority's determination is in line with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in full. We will follow the directive as soon as the timing and language are confirmed."
