The BBC engaged in a "serious breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about Gaza was the son of a Hamas official, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "materially misleading".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has directed the broadcaster to broadcast a peak-time declaration about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our code, we are ordering the BBC to broadcast a announcement of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," the statement read.
'Possibility to Damage Confidence'
The authority's announcement declared: "Our investigation found that the film's omission to reveal that the voice's father occupied a role in the Hamas-administered authority was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the presenter and the content 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 public broadcaster.
"This failing had the risk to erode the exceptionally strong levels of trust that viewers would have put in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was pulled from the online platform in the month of February after the presenter's family links emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the broadcaster's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A corporation official commented: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and language are finalised."
