The BBC was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the film was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has ordered the corporation to transmit a prime-time declaration about its decisions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our regulations, we are instructing the broadcaster to transmit 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 finalised," it said.
'Possibility to Undermine Credibility'
The regulator's announcement stated: "The inquiry we conducted found that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's male guardian held a post in the Hamas-administered administration was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the presenter and the information he presented.
"Trust is at the core of the connection between a television network and its public, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the risk to damage the very considerable degrees of credibility that the public would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in last February after the boy's family links were revealed, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it infringed the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which reflects Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with the authority's determination in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."
