The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas representative, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has directed the BBC to broadcast a peak-time statement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our regulations, we are directing the BBC to broadcast a announcement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," the statement read.
'Risk to Erode Confidence'
The regulator's statement said: "Our investigation found that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the presenter's parent served in a position in the Hamas-controlled government was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he presented.
"Trust is at the core of the bond between a broadcaster and its audience, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the possibility to undermine the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that viewers would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was removed from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the narrator's family links came to light, and in this past July an internal BBC review determined it violated the corporation's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A corporation official stated: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in full. We will follow the directive as soon as the date and language are determined."
