The British broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas representative, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has ordered the BBC to transmit a peak-time statement about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the corporation to transmit a message of our findings against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," it said.
'Possibility to Undermine Trust'
The authority's announcement stated: "The inquiry we conducted found that the programme's failure to disclose that the presenter's father served in a post in the Hamas-controlled administration was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the information he provided.
"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a broadcaster and its viewers, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the potential to damage the very considerable degrees of confidence that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was withdrawn from iPlayer in the month of February after the boy's family links were revealed, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it violated the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
