The British broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas representative, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has instructed the broadcaster to transmit a evening announcement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our rules, we are ordering the broadcaster to air a message of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a timing to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Potential to Erode Trust'
The regulator's report said: "Our investigation found that the film's failure to disclose that the voice's parent occupied a position in the Hamas-controlled authority was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the voice and the information he provided.
"Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a media organization and its viewers, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the potential to erode the very considerable levels of confidence that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was withdrawn from iPlayer in the month of February after the presenter's family links emerged, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A corporation official commented: "The authority's determination is in line with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which reflects clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the schedule and language are confirmed."
