The British broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas official, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has instructed the BBC to transmit a prime-time declaration about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our code, we are directing the corporation to broadcast a statement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Damage Trust'
The authority's statement said: "Our investigation determined that the documentary's omission to reveal that the presenter's father served in a role in the Hamas-administered administration was materially misleading.
"This implied that the audience did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the voice and the content he presented.
"Confidence is at the core of the connection between a television network and its public, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This failing had the potential to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of confidence that the public would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The film was removed from the online platform in last February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it violated the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A corporation official stated: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which aligns with clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and language are confirmed."
