The British broadcaster committed a "major breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a film about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas representative, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to accuracy".
The authority has instructed the broadcaster to broadcast a peak-time declaration about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the corporation to broadcast a announcement of our findings against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a timing to be determined," it said.
'Possibility to Erode Trust'
The watchdog's report stated: "The inquiry we conducted found that the documentary's failure to disclose that the narrator's parent held a role in the Hamas-run administration was materially misleading.
"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the voice and the information he provided.
"Confidence is at the core of the relationship between a broadcaster and its audience, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the risk to undermine the significantly high degrees of confidence that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the narrator's familial connections were revealed, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it violated the broadcaster's content policies on factual correctness.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in full. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
