The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas administrator, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has directed the corporation to air a prime-time statement about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our regulations, we are instructing the BBC to air a message of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a schedule to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Potential to Erode Confidence'
The regulator's report declared: "Our investigation found that the film's omission to reveal that the presenter's parent served in a role in the Hamas-controlled government was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the public did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the presenter and the details he shared.
"Confidence is at the heart of the connection between a media organization and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the potential to erode the very considerable degrees of credibility that viewers would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in this past July an internal BBC review determined it infringed the corporation's content policies on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which aligns with clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and wording are confirmed."
