The British broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas representative, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has directed the corporation to air a peak-time statement about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our code, we are ordering the corporation to transmit a message of our findings against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a timing to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Damage Confidence'
The authority's announcement said: "Our probe found that the programme's omission to reveal that the voice's father served in a position in the Hamas-controlled government was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the audience did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their assessment of the voice and the details he provided.
"Trust is at the heart of the connection between a media organization and its public, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.
"This failing had the risk to erode the very considerable amounts of credibility that audiences would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was withdrawn from the online platform in the month of February after the boy's familial connections came to light, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry found it breached the corporation's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
